Unexpected Companions
by Persephone Kore
Summary: Complete. Shadowlands with permission from Alicia. Friends may be enemies in the shifts... but old enemies may not be.
1. 1/10

_Disclaimer: Marvel's properties are Marvel's, used without explicit permission. The Shadowlands concept in this context was set up by Alicia, and is used with explicit permission. Enjoy._

**Unexpected Companions  
by Persephone  
Chapter 1/10**

Cable was fighting. He wasn't sure WHAT he was fighting, but rather suspected that _it_ thought _he_ was lunch. It was, in that case, mistaken. He hoped. 

He whacked another smoky-looking tentacle with the handle of his psimitar, no time to reverse and use the blade. The handle hit something and bounced.

Carnivorous smoke-and-rubber octopuses were not his favorite variety of fauna. And having a shift sweep across and bring him face to -- billow with its charcoal-black murkiness was not his favorite way to meet one.

Actually, that was a pretty lousy way to meet ANYTHING. Worse if the anything happened to be hostile, which this obviously was.

Shove away the arm that looped out of the smoke at him. Channel through the psimitar. Squint into a half-formless black cloud and release. Close his mouth on the cry of frustration as the hole torn in the mass wisped closed. 

He'd slept the night before. If it had really been night. There had been all the signs of night -- darkness, cooler air, visible stars, a moon -- if a rather sullen, reddish-looking moon, still a moon. 

Ignoring the fact that he was pretty sure that really large, crimson star that glowered down between sickly-looking shadow-clouds in the sky that wasn't _quite_ black, like a deathly-ill cyclops -- no, bad simile, BAD simile, don't think about that -- had been the sun.... If he could just ignore that, it had been night. Right.

Keep blocking the nearly amorphous thing away, with shields, with blows, whatever, and wonder why he bothered, why he didn't just let it eat him and be done with it... at least that way he'd do somebody, or something, some good.

Or, of course, he could give the thing energy enough to survive another while and hunt down some actual _innocent_. Besides, when he got right down to it, that survival instinct usually reared its stubborn head and got him fighting back anyway.

Even after a night like last night, when after the initial hours of blind, exhausted slumber he'd been prisoned in guilt-racked nightmares until he woke up to Apocalypse's choking taint, as the boundary swept through and left him practically in the arms of a predatory, tentacled fog-bank.

Ropy black mist had made a snatch for him, and he'd fought back, even out of the despair he'd been reliving in his dreams. He'd fought for his life.

And he'd thought it was his duty, his Mission, that had kept him going for so long. But he'd failed in it, and still insisted on living, despite the guilt he bore, despite the chronic disaster through which he and everyone else had to move, these days.

Slash at a protruding tentacle and wonder if he'd even hit anything but fog.

This was a very foggy shift altogether, it looked like. Very gray. Gray. Grey... STOP THAT. Very... foggy. What he could see of his surroundings was all haze, all beige and brown ground at his feet, all gray haze in the air, silver down to charcoal. 

The worst of fighting this _thing_ was that it had no clearly defined boundary; what looked like a wisp of darker fog could dart beside him and apparently solidify into a revoltingly rubbery and horribly, horribly strong tendril to grab and tangle his arm. He couldn't even get a proper grip on it telekinetically; the tentacles would bounce off his shields, but disintegrated into the fog when he tried to hold onto them.

He panted for breath, and couldn't shake the horror of wondering whether his next deep breath would suck in a strand of mist to solidify into a tentacle wiggling inside his lungs.

Thrust. Shield. Duck. 

Might help if he weren't so exhausted. Seemed as if the dreams had destroyed any good the deeper sleep might have done him. He felt bone-weary.

The last _pleasant_ shift had been the one two back. Nathan still missed it. Real, healthy, green plants, clear air, and a familiar sky, even if a few of the constellations had been a little weird. Then that strange world where sunset and night had no seeming relation, and now this. 

He felt bleak. He felt as if the fog had seeped into his brain and some sinister miasma was wrapping his thoughts and dulling his ability to think, to strategize. He felt miserably exhausted. He felt there was nothing left, no good he could do anyone, no way to make up for causing this, and no one to keep living to see. He'd lost track of Dom -- any Dom -- what seemed like ages ago. He felt....

He felt like giving up.

But he kept fighting anyway.

He always did. Maybe that was it. Maybe it wasn't really any desire to stay alive.

Maybe it was just habit.

Habit didn't explain the hot jolt of fear when he was taken off guard, let himself get dragged a little nearer the murky black center of the creature -- and saw a wickedly hooked _beak_ open and reach toward him. 

Adrenaline surged through him anew as he brought his psimitar up and threw himself frantically backwards, forcing a shield out against the tentacles blocking his way. Abused muscles threatened to give out.

He saw two huge eyes as the light from his own left eye reflected moistly off their surfaces, glinting deep in the center of the black smoke. Eyes that could have been human, maybe were -- could they be? An earlier victim perhaps? They looked... almost pleading.

He faltered in shock, hesitated, and recovered too slowly as the thing's arms lashed around him, bonelessly, trying to pull him closer to the beak, the maw. Cable struggled valiantly, shoving away, winning a little more breathing space, such a little more, but knowing with a sinking despair that he was too tired to pull entirely free. Was the creature's grasp weakening? Yes.

Not enough.

He saw an opening and took it, aiming a blow to the center of the mass. The laws of physics chose that moment to indulge in a slight frolic, and the blade of the psimitar jerked sideways as gravity pirouetted. It then tried to curl backwards, crawl up the handle, and bite his hand.

No it didn't. It only looked that way. Optical illusion. Not terribly unusual. But the stroke that might have freed him still went awry.

A flash of silver in the mist registered in his peripheral vision. Light? Or was he just starting to hallucinate? His telekinetic shield was still holding -- at least enough that he couldn't be seeing things due to the constriction cutting off airflow.

"...Yes, we have to." 

What? 

The voice was feminine, weary, and unfamiliar, and its tone bespoke strained patience. The one that responded, though, sent a chill through him.

"I know, I know." A hint of annoyance. But that didn't matter.

That was Stryfe.

Cable fought a little harder, struggling to force his body to respond, trying to force the tentacles away. Bright Lady -- he was NOT going to have Stryfe watch him be mangled and eaten by a smoky land-walking octopus! 

A telekinetic shield, glimmering gold, formed just outside Nathan's own and extended to wrap the entire creature, then peeled from around him and became a bubble that began steadily shrinking. The interior, beneath the transparent yellow, filled completely to black as the contents were compressed further.

The shield looked a little... shaky, Nathan noted with some reasonably objective part of his brain, in between looking wildly around to locate the newcomer. He returned his gaze sharply to the golden gleam as a popping sound heralded a fire that flickered sullenly inside the bubble, accompanied by writhings and more noises like snapping bubble wrap or crackling bacon, for about thirty seconds. 

The gold winked out, telekinetic field dissipating, and the stench of scorched rubber filled the air. The creature lay limp, dark smoke hanging heavily over it but sluggishly clearing.

Beak. Large eyes. Tentacles -- eight of them -- sprawled gracelessly on the hard-packed ground.

Who'd have guessed, Cable thought absurdly. It WAS an octopus.

And why hadn't he thought of that? Maybe the fog _had_ gotten to his brain.

"Nathan?" Stryfe again. Oath, where was the man? Cable scanned the mist for another flash of silver, scanned telepathically and felt the light probe slapped away. _There._

The glint of silver came from the right direction, but the armored figure who stepped out of the mist was too short and much too female to be Stryfe. It was... a girl. Cable nearly smacked himself as his brain stalled for a moment over that brilliant observation. Long blond hair, sword -- 

Illyana Rasputin. Magik.

Not a child, certainly. Not even a teenager -- well, maybe. Looking at her face, at her eyes, Nathan was certain she was older than 16, and less than 40, but he would have hesitated to try to pin it down any more firmly.

"Hello... Nathan." She sounded strangely resigned. He yanked his attention away from her as the source of the earlier voice approached close enough to be visible behind her.

Stryfe, oddly enough, wasn't wearing armor. Not the trademark silver spiky stuff that would almost have qualified as camouflage in this place, anyway. 

Cable brought the psimitar up, in arms aching almost too much to hold it steady. Then he hesitated. Yes, this was Stryfe. On the other hand, he didn't have the energy to fight if he didn't have to -- and with Magik alive and walking around, there were obviously significant timeline differences involved. 

And Stryfe had killed the rubber octopus thing, which -- no matter how hard the portion of his brain devoted to suspicion hammered at it -- Nathan couldn't seem to construe as a hostile act. Not towards him, anyway. The octopus probably would have had a different opinion, but he couldn't bring himself to care.

Which reminded him, why hadn't _he_ thought of that trick?

Either his telepathic shields weren't up to par, or he'd muttered the question aloud. He got an answer.

"I don't know." Stryfe hesitated, and spread his hands. "Possibly the same reason I didn't, when one got... up close and personal," he suggested dryly. 

Cable knit his brows as his clone moved closer to Illyana, who glanced up over her shoulder but didn't step away or object. "How'd you get rid of that one?"

"I didn't." The other man looked down at Magik with a slightly embarrassed smile. "Illyana teleported me away from it. We've avoided them since. Mostly."

It made Nathan feel marginally better that Stryfe had also had to be rescued from the creature, or a similar one. Marginally less humiliated, anyway. Of course, that begged the question of WHY Illyana would be rescuing Stryfe, not to mention why Stryfe would be rescuing _him_. 

He remembered the first voice -- Magik's, of course, he realized now -- saying "we have to." Her idea? That still didn't explain why she'd think they "had to," or why Stryfe would bother listening to her in the first place.

Nathan was really beginning to think that meeting people he almost knew, from timelines almost like his own, was much stranger on some levels than any of the wilder variations in climate, physics, or history. 

He tried another scan, two very light psionic probes, really. The one aimed at Illyana simply plinked off shields that somehow gave the impression of being made of the same stuff as her armor. Not that that made any sense. The other made Stryfe's eyes widen slightly and was swatted away with rather more force than seemed necessary.

"Quit that, will you?" Stryfe said irritably. He gave Nathan a wary look. "I... both our shields are shot. Let it be." Cable frowned. His own shields _were_ a bit strained, though he wouldn't have gone so far as to say shot, and he assumed Stryfe knew the condition of his. 

And this was no place not to be able to shield. Nowhere was anymore, really.

Stryfe had lived with Apocalypse. Nathan wondered if he could sense the foulness in the shifts as well, or if the sensitivity had more to do with having been part of the Twelve. Then again, would it even _bother_ Stryfe? Sure, it felt like pure evil, but that wouldn't necessarily grate on him the same way. Not on the Chaos-Bringer. Still, Stryfe hadn't liked Apocalypse too much either. 

Illyana sighed. "Are you two going to stand and stare at each other until Doomsday? I think you both know what the other looks like by now."

Cable started. "Doomsday," he muttered. "I think we already had that." Stryfe laughed shortly. Cable shot him a brief glare. It hadn't been a joke.

"Guys. Camp, maybe? There's wood nearby. Or something similar, at any rate. We could build a fire, easily enough, and I can... arrange for... food." He raised an eyebrow at her tone. A little impatient, shading into something half smug and half rueful at the end. 

The tangle of wood -- dead thornbushes, it looked like -- was very near; a few steps in the right direction and Illyana caught her foot and nearly fell into it before Stryfe steadied her. It didn't take long to lay a fire. Cable rummaged in his pack, wondering if the food he himself carried would still be edible, or even recognizable -- on one memorable occasion, a bag of walnuts had turned into topaz during a shift. Which had been very pretty, but he'd gone hungry the next few days. 

It seemed to be fine, though there was always the off chance of something turning spontaneously into poison, even without a shift. He found a box of dry matches, too, but dropped it back upon seeing a small flare of light, then a larger one, as the arranged wood burst fiercely into flame under a glare from Stryfe. 

Illyana glanced his direction as he stood up with food in hand. Cheese and zucchini, for some reason. He collected some interesting combinations. And extremely salted meat from some creature whose taxonomy he hadn't inquired too closely about beyond ascertaining it to be edible. 

"Nathan, I said I could arrange for a meal. You... can consider yourself our guest, after a fashion."

He looked up. "I know, Illyana. But... I have this, so it only seems right to offer." It was standard courtesy, really; if you made camp with somebody, you shared food if you had any. Something he'd grown up with, which didn't mean a thing to the world he was in now, but also a tacit agreement that seemed to develop among decent folk in highly uncertain conditions.... "Besides, we might as well eat it now. There's no telling what it might turn into otherwise."

"True." She nodded, face serious and somehow drawn. "I'll supplement, though. I don't think I'd trust the water here."

Nathan sat down beside the fire. It felt good; the haze was damp, chill now that he wasn't fighting, and very slightly stinging if he thought about it too long or breathed too deeply. He caught Stryfe giving him an oddly grateful glance and returned an inquiring one.

#Illyana 'arranging for' food means conjuring it. Not that I'm complaining, of course, but food from Limbo is... more than a bit strange sometimes, even compared to what can be found in some of the shifts. You'll see.# The transmission was careful, and extremely guarded, but what else would he have expected? They might not be treating each other as enemies, and they might be from different timelines, but he was still himself and this was still Stryfe. 

#I'm sure I will,# he replied, still a little bemused. He did. Illyana gestured, and a stepping disk deposited a damask tablecloth, three place-settings, and a few serving dishes -- made of what looked like gunmetal --whose contents issued an inviting steam into the surrounding haze and looked, at first glance, perfectly normal. 

Realizing one of the steaming dishes contained ice cream banished the "normal" impression. 

None of the three seemed inclined to bother making small talk, so the first portion of the meal was eaten in weary silence. Cable sipped piping-hot wintergreen-flavored tea from a tiny bone china cup that must have served him a quart of the stuff before it emptied, and tried to convince himself that the thin material was in fact bone _china_. And that the trickle of red from a minuscule chip on the rim was from having cut his own lip on the jagged edge. 

Curiosity finally nagged him into speaking. "Why did you help me? And thank you, by the way."

He was expecting a response from Stryfe, who after all -- galling as it was -- had been the one who actually pried his opponent away. He got a murmured, "You're welcome," from that direction, but Illyana was the one who answered the question. So to speak.

She looked up, her face somehow drawn. "I owe you," she said simply.

"You don't owe me anything. You can't. We're not even from the same timeline." 

"It's close enough." She gave him a strange smile. "I can tell."

He wasn't sure he wanted to know. The conversation flagged uneasily over a course of what seemed to be cucumbers stuffed with rose hips until Nathan finally decided the dish might make a good change of topic. "Just out of curiosity, what is this?"

Illyana poked at hers. "Cucumbers. Stuffed with rose hips, I think." She pulled the Soulsword closer to her from where she had laid it on the ground, and scooted sideways to lean against Stryfe. Her plate followed her.

"Ouch," Stryfe protested. Magik's armor lacked the spikes his had sported, but still had some rather vicious protrusions. Cable tried not to snort.

"Sorry." She sheathed the sword and armor gave way disorientingly to something resembling a dark blue silk sweatsuit. 

Nathan studied his own plate again. "That's what I thought. Why?"

"Pearls are hard to chew, I guess."

"Pearls?"

"It's from a fairy tale. Cucumbers stuffed with pearls. I think it was a symbol of foolishness." 

"Oh." Was this supposed to tell him, or them, something, or just be disconcerting?

They all fell silent again. The zucchini turned out to go remarkably well with the cucumbers and "pearls." Fascinatingly enough, so did the oysters Stryfe discovered in the jade container the centerpiece had just turned into. Illyana scowled reprovingly at the transformation. The oysters ignored her and did a Carroll-esque softshoe without any feet before settling down and behaving like food. 

The meal was delicious at first, and showed none of the disquieting propensity some viands had lately, for turning halfway through the meal into something else entirely. There was a faint, peculiarly repulsive aftertaste to it, however, one that was certainly not unbearable but suggested a plausible explanation for Stryfe's apparent weariness of conjured meals.

Cable nearly jumped as Stryfe stirred from several minutes spent gazing unfocusedly at the corpse of the land-octopus and spoke to him. "I don't suppose," he said tiredly, "that you have any idea what caused," he paused to gesture at the landscape, "all this? The shifts, that is -- I'm assuming some variety of temporospatial catastrophe, but we haven't run into anyone who seemed to know what happened."

Nathan's throat constricted and went dry as he stared across at the other man and a wave of agony soaked him. Ozymandias had understated the case. His actions hadn't just doomed one world, but all of them.... He'd known that. But he hadn't had anyone ask him about it about point blank before. He didn't -- couldn't -- answer right away. 

"Well, you -- our Cable, that is -- did say something about Apocalypse, before we lost track of him completely. He wasn't terribly coherent about it, claimed he _knew_ but wasn't sure _what_ he knew." Stryfe shook his head. "I suppose it's rather nonsensical to keep asking, but when the world falls apart on an otherwise perfectly uneventful day, one tends to wonder why. If you don't know, never mind."

"Oh, I know why." His voice cracked harshly and he could have choked on the lump in his suddenly raw throat. Nathan gulped back more of the wintergreen tea, blood and all, and wished it were something alcoholic. "It was my fault," he said miserably. "We fought Apocalypse. We lost. _I_ lost. I couldn't kill him." He shut his eyes and cursed the tremor in his voice. "Twice. Twice! The first time he -- tried to possess Nate Grey, as his first host, and Scott j-jumped in the way and... when we fought him again... oath, I think it nearly drove Jean around the curve -- bend, I mean bend -- to strike even one blow. And this," he gestured grandly, throat and chest aching, "this was the result. Some savior I turned out to be."

Why was he telling them all this? Why that last, in particular? Was he trying to beat Stryfe to all the possible taunts about the whole wreck? The laugh Cable barked out then was more than half a sob. "Guess Ozymandias was right. Only he didn't go far enough. I thought I could get around his prophecy and ended up dragging everything else down at the same time, doing even worse -- guess I went around the wrong side." He was shaking now.

There was a long silence. Those seemed to be a prime feature of the conversation lately. 

Nathan felt a hand on his shoulder and opened his eyes again, wondering dully when he'd closed them. Illyana's dark blue eyes hovered in a worried face in front of his. "Calm down." He obeyed, somehow, not sure why or how. She withdrew, went to lean on his clone again. "These things happen."

These things happen?! He told her he'd essentially destroyed her _world_, thrown it into a muddled mess with an infinity of other worlds, and she said "these things happen"?

"It was the second battle that did it. Ripped apart reality, somehow... I don't know exactly what happened, how it worked, but Apocalypse tried to -- reshape the world -- and," he swallowed hard, painfully, "when I tried to stop him I think it only made things worse. _I_ only made things worse. The chronovariant component -- everything just started... sliding together." 

He reinforced his shields with everything he had as another shift-line swept over them. Stryfe hunched. Illyana arched her neck slightly and glared at the tablecloth as if daring anything on it to change. It very meekly didn't. The fog thickened and took on a faintly blue tinge with yellowish streaks, and the air grew dimmer and a bit colder, but the shift was overall less than dramatic.

"And to think I was the one they called Chaos-Bringer."

Cable would have lunged at Stryfe, at the soft comment and half smile, if he hadn't been sunk so deep in guilt that it mired his limbs. Illyana leaned away slightly and administered a light kick to the calf. "Stryfe."

The man sighed and moved his leg out of range. "All right, yes, that was out of line." He shrugged. "Quit worrying, Nathan."

"Quit _worrying_?!"

"You're projecting."

Illyana shook her head and intervened. "It's already happened; we just have to live with it. Things could be worse." 

His voice broke again. "How?"

"You don't want to know. But there are dimensions -- unaffected by the collapse, some of them -- that are worse. I've looked." She bit her lip. "And even here... think about it. People could just turn on each other. Some of them do. But at least the worlds I've been through... with everything going mad all around them, people still pull together more often than not. More often than they try to tear each other apart."

"I... hadn't noticed."

"Did you look?" she asked gently. "I suppose I could just be experiencing some sort of statistical fluke, but it's something."

Nathan couldn't answer. He tried. His voice had choked off in his throat even before he realized that he really could simply think of nothing to say, even if he had found himself able to speak. He closed his mouth and tried to swallow past the swollen ache beneath his jaw. All the bruises from his earlier combat, and all those accumulated over the weeks -- or months, or years, from the feel -- seemed to ache _at_ him, individually and with malice, and each cut stung with sweat.

He couldn't help thinking he deserved it.

She was trying to make him feel better. Illyana was. Some Illyana whose timeline had clearly not involved her miserable illness and death. Whose timeline had, "on an otherwise perfectly uneventful day," been thrown into this seething cross-temporal wreck because of _his_ failure.

_It's already happened; we just have to live with it._

_What is, is._

He could have done without drawing that parallel. He couldn't tell whether her version was of particular help to Illyana in coping, though she'd said it as if it were something she genuinely took for granted, but for him?

Somehow, when he had really, truly, and thoroughly screwed up -- and this, to employ the next several years' quota of understatement for at least half a dozen recently and forcibly merged timelines, qualified as outdoing himself in that department -- when he had quite distinctly made a mess of things, reminding himself that "What is, is" rarely seemed to do much good, and he often began to wish that "sorry" had a meaning worth the name.

Nathan withdrew into a soggy blanket of fog and wretchedness, trying to ignore the uneasy glances both the others cast in his direction across the tablecloth. He still couldn't help noticing that Illyana appeared slightly pained, and Stryfe -- after a glance down at her face -- directed towards him a look that was rather less worried and more exasperated than the earlier ones. 

"A statistical fluke?" Stryfe asked the girl quietly.

"It's always a possibility."

"Or you could be drawn to certain types of timeline, I suppose."

"You've been there too; you don't have to act like it's just me. It wouldn't be the timeline, necessarily, either -- most of the people probably aren't in their own anymore."

Cable couldn't help flinching at that one. He _felt_ Stryfe glance his direction, and it penetrated his awareness that his clone's next comment was specifically intended to prevent Illyana from noticing the flinch.

"I suppose not. Maybe you're a good influence."

"HAH!"

"You're the one who insists on playing fairy godmother to every version of my 'brother' you can locate, in the absence of ours." 

Illyana laughed softly and murmured something Nathan couldn't quite catch. Fairy godmother? What a bizarre thought -- made even _more_ bizarre by Stryfe's involvement. 

Nathan finally roused himself to speak into the following silence. "Why _are_ you two traveling together?" He directed a slightly harder gaze at Stryfe than this version had lately done much to warrant. "If you meant what I think you meant about her 'playing fairy godmother,' you can't be too fond of the activity, and to be blunt, I'd imagine in most timelines I'd probably attack you on sight."

Stryfe smiled ever so faintly. "Who says you don't? For that matter, who says most ever see me at all?"

Now THAT gave him chills.

"Why do you travel together?" he repeated, more insistently. There had to be some reason. _Different timeline,_ he reminded himself. The relationships he was used to didn't have to apply. All right, so it was fairly obvious that they didn't -- and if they did, he would at present be being digested in leisurely fashion by a half-substantial octopus, so he should probably avoid complaining.

"It's better than traveling alone." Ouch. He wasn't even sure if Stryfe had meant that to hurt the way it did, but loneliness practically swamped him as the fog seemed to thicken. 

He snorted. "You have to be getting something out of it." An unpleasant possibility skittered into his head, as he watched how close they were sitting, and he knew he had to be looking suspicious. "Don't know if I like the idea of you going around with a teenage girl --"

Stryfe looked absolutely furious. "You honestly think I --" he began, starting to push himself to his feet.

Illyana tugged him back down and he subsided, but the outrage he was projecting didn't. It didn't feel fake, either. She, though, sounded more amused than anything else. "He hasn't done anything objectionable, I assure you. And we do not need a chaperon. Although," she added meditatively, "I'm not exactly a teenager anymore, at least from my perspective, and I have considered seducing him every now and then."

Cable sputtered helplessly, mouth dropping open. Surely she had to be joking. He hoped. Didn't she?

Stryfe didn't look much less shocked than Cable felt. Aghast might have been an apt description. Taking Illyana by the arms, he removed her from his shoulder and turned her to face him. "_Please_ tell me you aren't serious. Illyana, you're a _child_." 

She shrugged away, eyes laughing, shadows almost gone. "How do you know how old I am?" she asked, almost playfully. "You know I've spent more time in Limbo than I've spent away from Earth, but not how much. With the spells I know, I could be older than you by now." She looked mischievous. "Not that I'm telling."

"Illyana...."

"All right, no, I wasn't serious." Stryfe looked absurdly relieved and let her settle against him again. "Though I have to say, that reaction was just short of insulting." She turned to Cable, who realized he was still gaping and shut his mouth firmly. "He's known me since I was about nine; I appreciate the concern -- sort of -- but there's really nothing to worry about." The blue of her eyes seemed to darken. "It's not as if I've really been a child since... ah, never mind. That's not the point."

"What was the point?" Nathan asked, voice rather shakier than he would have liked. 

"Why Illyana and I were traveling together, I believe," Stryfe replied. Agitation from Illyana's rather bizarre sense of humor over, he didn't sound as if the distraction had done much to placate him after Cable's question -- his voice carried a hint of a snarl. "And what I was 'getting out of it.'"

Cable bristled at the tone, but found he couldn't quite ignore the nagging feeling that his suspicion _had_ turned out to be unjustified. There was that nagging guilt-whisper, too, saying that he'd destroyed their world. "All right. It's all perfectly innocent, then." He couldn't really help the trace of sarcasm. "That still doesn't explain it."

"I told you --"

"That it's better than traveling alone," he snapped back. "I heard you. That doesn't explain how you keep TRACK of each other." And oh, how he wished he could have done that with... people... and especially with Dom.

Stryfe's teeth glittered faintly in a wry smile. "Mostly, she keeps track of me. She's very good at this, really; I have some advantage in most types of battle and I can sense shifts fairly well, but she can actually bypass them."

"What do you mean, bypass?" 

"Through Limbo. If we're separated, I might be able to force a path through the shifts -- but I doubt it; I can tell to some extent what's going on, but I'm not sure about control. For some reason Sanctity didn't bother putting much emphasis on chronovariance." He smiled mirthlessly. "I only found out I was supposed to have it during some discussion of using _yours_ to fix Legion's time-distortion."

"Oh, _really_. Should I even ask what you've used it for since?"

"Apparently safer pursuits than --" Cable realized what Stryfe had to be about to say and almost flinched ahead of time. 

"What. He. Was. Saying," Magik's icy voice interrupted before hostility could escalate further, "was that I navigate well." Nathan found himself surprisingly glad for the reprieve; he hadn't even really intended to start a fight -- it was just such a habitual expectation, that any conversation between himself and Stryfe would involve baiting at the bare minimum. He and Stryfe glanced uneasily at each other and silently both settled back.

"Navigate. Bypass. You can get _around_ the shifts through Limbo?"

"There's only one Limbo for all the different timelines. No, no, don't look like that; it's always been that way. When timelines split in Limbo, you don't necessarily see your alternates again -- but then again, you might. Time and space aren't nearly as distinct there; stepping discs make gateways through both, and if you walk far enough you just might stroll through your past, or a completely different version of it."

"That has to make things interesting." It defied everything he'd ever been taught about the timestream. Of course, so did the world or worlds he'd been walking through for the past... the past... oath, it felt like forever.

No. No, they didn't. He'd been taught that going from one timeline to another was difficult, which it no longer was, but he'd also been taught that it was dangerous -- both to the traveler and to the timestream itself -- and THAT was holding up all too well. If this didn't qualify as damage to the timestream, he didn't know what did.

"I suppose interesting is one word for it -- but it's natural there, you see. So are changes in landscape with little warning; so are changes around you in reality itself -- especially when I'm there and reigning, because at the peak of my power I could defeat Franklin Richards, Kevin MacTaggart, and Jamie Braddock in Limbo all at once. And Mikhail, if I had to." She spoke matter-of-factly, with no pride at all. 

Cable grew suddenly quite certain that she was not, in truth, proud of her power there. It simply... was, and sometimes, from her voice, it was to be regretted. "Impressive."

"If you say so." Confirmation, from the dull indifference of her tone and the way she leaned into Stryfe's shoulder. "Useful, at any rate. Aside from the convenience of being able to conjure supplies and command them, to some degree, to behave themselves," she continued, with a growing hint of amusement, "I do have the advantage of being accustomed to a far more mutable version of time and space."

"I knew your stepping discs went through time as easily as space, and something about their being a natural phenomenon there." He found himself becoming curious. Maybe that was what she'd meant to evoke? "And I've... seen how it's possible to visit different times, there, without apparent transitions. But this...." Some part of him cringed from asking, but he went on anyway. "You don't have... shards of different timelines sliding into each other like this, do you?"

"Not exactly, but -- this isn't so different from Limbo, in some ways. All timelines are one, there, and you can walk or teleport between them without much difficulty. On the other hand, here you generally notice."

"Hard not to, when a shift-line opens under you," Nathan said bitterly. He'd seen that happen too many times, to too many people he would have warned if he'd only learned to recognize the signs a few seconds faster, if only his throat hadn't locked in fear and horror on the words, if only they'd listened. 

Illyana's eyes softened, he thought, though he could only meet them for a moment. "I think nearly everyone," everyone left alive, Nathan fancied he could hear her not saying, "is learning to tell when one is about to open. Stepping discs can be almost as much of a danger, too, though a little training -- or as in my case a natural control -- usually is a sufficient counter."

"If you say so." He stared blindly into the fire. "I keep expecting to turn a corner, and run into myself, only it never happens. But I can... feel... the others of me. Somewhere. It's because it's our fault, you see. All the Twelve. All with our complicity in this."

He could almost hear Illyana deciding not to respond to the more guilt-stricken portion of his musings. "There's a bit of an energy or probability barrier against running into your own alternates or past selves, I believe -- simple enough to see them, but somehow there seems to be a skewing against interaction. Not that it's impossible, of course. That's in Limbo. It may work similarly here."

"Maybe so."

Nathan heard her quiet sigh and the faint sound of fabric against fabric as she changed positions. "Still. As I said, the shifting has a lot in common with Limbo, so my experience there gives me something of an advantage. There's not the same taint, though -- and," she added with a hint of laughter in her voice, "a lack of the same potential for accidental time travel."

He couldn't help snorting. "Oh, there's a taint. Every shift feels like it's got Apocalypse's slimy hands all over it -- at least to me. As for not time traveling by accident? Don't count on it."

"Why not?" Stryfe echoed Magik at that, an instant behind, his voice sharper and more anxious than her still-cool one.

Cable looked up, a wry smile twisting his lips. "Think about it," he said, eyes darting from one to the other. "It's cross-time travel that's always been supposed to be hardest, take the most energy, carry the most risks. That's what happens every time one of the shifts opens or even _moves_ -- things or people going to different timelines. Pieces of time itself going to different timelines, maybe."

Illyana, accustomed to the seemingly (formerly?) unique rules of Limbo, still watched him with a careful, attentive expression, trying to understand what he was getting at. Stryfe's eyes, though, held a dawning comprehension. Cable shook his head at them both. "Compared to that, going back and forth in chronology is child's play. If that much ordering hasn't broken down yet, it's only a matter of time until it does."

"Isn't everything?" Stryfe murmured. 

Cable glowered at him for a moment before turning a less hostile scowl on Illyana. "That explains why he'd want to be around you, I guess. 'Navigation,' as you put it, and the conjuring. But what good does he do you?"

The sorceress pushed a lock of shining hair behind her left ear and smiled, dazzlingly and with the air of one who was very mildly offended and whose next words could turn a world inside out. "He keeps me sane."

Cable looked at Illyana. Then he looked at Stryfe. Stryfe looked back and shrugged. "To be perfectly honest, I think I find that very nearly as frightening as you probably do." Cable noticed Stryfe didn't deny the truth of it, though.

This comment effectively killed the conversation.

It remained clinically dead for several minutes before Nathan, growing almost desperate for something _else_ to think about -- something besides the idea of Stryfe keeping ANYONE sane, and besides his own guilt, and besides what further progress of the disaster might assail the ravaged timestream -- resuscitated it by asking as delicately as he could how the two had come to be on such good terms.

"... In my timeline, I didn't get the idea you -- er, my versions of you -- would have been terribly fond of each other. Not even sure they ever met." It felt very strange to be claiming a version of Stryfe. 

Illyana chuckled and seemed to relax. "Well, we made friends after he came back from the moon and I got pulled out of Russia when my parents died. And he didn't give up on me when I turned semi-demonic again at eleven. More details... well, some of it's... kind of sensitive, and I don't know about Stryfe but I'm _tired_. So... let me try this, it should work...."

Cable blinked as Illyana reached through a small stepping disk and pulled out an oddly twisted piece of thick golden wire. His eye tried to trace it before deciding, a bit queasily, that it appeared to have sprung full-grown from a rather sinister Escher painting. She flicked at it and a liquid shimmer formed to cover the largest loop. 

Stryfe looked slightly tense. Illyana murmured something at the contraption and held it out to Cable. He took it, a little doubtfully.

"It's something of a scrying device. I keyed it to start from the nexus point that split our timelines -- for some reason I can trace this if you're involved -- and you can use it to look at what happened."

"How does it work?"

"Magic."

"I should have known."

"Yeah." She gave him a half-smile. "As long as you're touching the framework it will respond to your commands. That's the idea. But because we're the only ones here from that timeline you won't be able to get much of anything from when we weren't there -- maybe a few snatches with your alternate around, though. And it tends toward stuff that could be considered timeline-crucial, or just was important to one of us." 

Illyana shrugged. "So it's not that different from having us tell you, except with more detail and less subjectivity and nobody freezing up over awkward subjects." She yawned until her jaw popped. "None of that either."

"Well... thank you." I think, he added silently. "I'll... take first watch?"

"Nothing to watch. I set wards. So if you want to look at the scryer you have time."

Cable glanced doubtfully at the small device. Would it cooperate? And why wasn't Stryfe talking? Oath, maybe he was exhausted too. Bright Lady knew Nathan himself was, but there was no way he was getting to sleep anytime soon anyway. And for all he had to hate Stryfe over, he wouldn't have blamed either of these two if they'd hated him for his part in dragging their timeline into this depressing muddle.

There were plenty of perfectly legitimate things to blame Stryfe for, after all. No need to get unreasonable.

Illyana sat up again from where she'd just curled onto the ground, next to Stryfe and wrapped in a blanket colored some bizarre shade of smoky purple that seemed inclined to melt into the haze surrounding them in this shift.

"I almost forgot. Don't touch the surface itself. Just the frame." She curled up again and seemed to be asleep before he could ask her what happened if he did touch the surface.

Cable stared at it for a moment and tried willing it to work. 

~Jean stretched out a hand to Stryfe on the moon, promising help, promising family to a terrifying, terrified supervillain -- and in one timeline, beaten, desperate, he conquered his distrust, staggered back from the brink of suicide and epidemic distribution, and reached to take the offered hand.~

He jumped slightly at the voice, unable even to tell for sure whether it had been sound or thought, and glanced over at Stryfe and Illyana.

Stryfe hadn't moved. Illyana had sat up and looked faintly amused. She'd heard it, then? Nathan raised an inquiring eyebrow. "What was THAT all about?"

Illyana shrugged. "It's a modified version of a fairly old spell. Comes with a pretentious omniscient narrator. You can tell it to shut up if you want."

She went back to sleep. Cable sat cross-legged -- on the ground, not upside-down in the air, not here -- and looked into the contraption again. Visuals might be nice, here...

The liquid-like shimmering surface flickered once, then seemed to dilate to fill his entire field of vision. And he watched.

**********


	2. 2/10

_Disclaimer: Marvel's properties are Marvel's, used without explicit permission. The Shadowlands concept in this context was set up by Alicia, and is used with explicit permission. Enjoy._

**Unexpected Companions  
by Persephone  
Chapter 2/10**

They took him home, of course. 

Cable went back to Earth with them, seemingly in shock, and promptly disappeared again two minutes and forty seconds after landing. So did Domino. The natural supposition (which was in fact accurate) was that they had disappeared together. Members of X-Force who were fairly well disposed toward both parties regarded this as somewhat encouraging, if irritating, and due to a lack of further data no one could really contradict them.

X-Force, not surprisingly, was moved en masse into Xavier's mansion. Some of them made a fuss. Sam wound up as a sort of liaison, once a reconciliation was induced regarding the surrounding issues. Sam's having been drawn off to the X-Men, the X-Men's having imprisoned X-Force, the X-Men's having now taken in the man who'd done what they'd been pursuing Cable for at the time... that sort of thing.

As a matter of fact, the X-Men were _still_, or again, pursuing Cable. After a fashion. More accurately, they were trying to find him, and encountering a distinct lack of success. Cerebro could not locate him. The combined efforts of all the telepaths they could bring to bear could not locate him.

"Stryfe, are you sure you can't --"

"Think about what you are asking for a few minutes. If Nathan and I could find one another telepathically as a general rule, at least one of us would have been dead for several years by now."

**********

The watching Nathan, of course, knew exactly where his alternate had gone. Greymalkin. He had essentially fled there when it really registered that _Stryfe_ was being taken in as Scott's and Jean's son, and a sort of ward of the X-Men. Of course, he also thought he himself was the clone, still, and Stryfe the original.

Nathan could only imagine how those would have felt, in combination -- there was, of course, no way he would have come to any conclusion other than that he would be unwelcome, to say the least, even though as an observer with a little distance he could see that no one had tried to exclude him. 

He was only surprised that his alternate had had the presence of mind and the confidence to ask Domino to accompany him -- and somewhat that she'd been willing to do so. It wasn't, though, as if they'd really abandoned X-Force; the kids could do just fine without them, and had all the X-Men as mentors if they wanted them. 

Now, there was a daunting thought....

So the timeline had been different because the Stryfe dozing on the other side of the fire had had sense enough, or nerve enough, or something, to take Jean at her word. Cable still had doubts about how much sense Jean had been exhibiting when she made the offer, but given this Stryfe's behavior to date, apparently there hadn't been _too_ much of a backlash.

After a few more moments of reflection and some calming breaths, he looked back into the scryer. Fascinating, the way it showed him the timeline and yet almost told it as a story, half-buried beneath conscious perception. 

The next scene he chose to watch was actually a little earlier, coming before they'd really had a chance to start seeking their Cable. It also showed a little more of the bent Illyana had mentioned, toward focusing on her and Stryfe. A blink, an intention, and he was drawn almost into the scene of their first meeting....

**********

Having just gotten back, the X-Men apparently considered introductions to be in order. "...And this is Illyana, my little sister," Piotr was saying. Stryfe forbore to point out in exasperation that he already knew perfectly well who she was, and in fact knew perfectly well who all of them were, and had studied them in considerable detail. This was probably wise.

There was also to be considered the fact that while he could identify each member of the X-Men, not to mention assorted associates and satellites thereof, on sight, his predictions regarding their behavior -- at least Scott's and Jean's -- had failed, and failed in spectacular fashion. This rendered him more cautious than usual. Wary. 

Secretly, he was both cynical about the likelihood they were sincere, and dubious about their sanity if they in fact were. Of course, he hoped the latter, and that they wouldn't come to their senses any time soon. Stryfe would, he decided, rather to his own alarm, genuinely prefer to die than find Jean's offer false, or revoked.

He was... fearful?

Stryfe slammed that thought instantly and furiously into the back of his mind and tried to ignore it, concentrating instead on the present as Colossus picked up the small blonde girl -- about nine years old, it appeared, though chronologically she should be a year or so older. She'd lost the time she spent with the New Mutants as well as that in Limbo, during the still-bewildering chain of events two years ago. 

Illyana was comfortable, cheerful, and quite without fear, perched on her brother's hip and encircled by his arm. She regarded Stryfe with wide, dark blue eyes and only looked a little bit shy. "My precious Snowflake -- Illyana, meet Str-- er, Christopher." Piotr looked toward Scott for confirmation. 

"Snowflake?" Stryfe muttered. "You are aware most of the snowflakes I've encountered in my life have been corrosive?" 

Colossus drew his brows together, eyes darkening a little at the less than civil response. Illyana, either too innocent to consider that she might have just been insulted or simply too inclined toward friendliness to assume it, twisted slightly in his arms and smiled, appeared to consider, and then held out the pine branch she'd been carrying. 

Stryfe looked at it in some confusion. She shook it a little and held it out farther. He took the branch, rather uncertainly, but felt completely ridiculous carrying it around and handed it back at the first opportunity. Illyana, by that time on her own feet again and running around, nonplussed him completely by shortly leaving it on the ground on her way to some other game.

**********

Cable stopped to consider. There was something odd about the cast of that first meeting, as shown in the scryer; it hadn't really meant a lot to either one of them at the time, though in retrospect it had taken on a little more significance, almost more intellectual than otherwise. Still, he wasn't sure whether or not the device would have shown it to him had he not specifically thought to seek Illyana's and Stryfe's first meeting.

He relaxed his mind a little, choosing by some instinct or feeling he couldn't quite identify a specific _kind_ of relaxation that seemed to cause the bizarre device to skim through events in a way that gave him a general sense of things, but gave it a certain freedom in what it showed.

There was something obscurely satisfying about learning that Stryfe was _not_ so very readily accepted -- oh, everyone tried, to be sure, but for obvious reasons tended to be uneasy around him. And of course Stryfe could tell. He would have had to be not only mindblind but fantastically oblivious to avoid noticing. 

Xavier was exceedingly polite and outwardly unflappable, and never in word or gesture made reference in Stryfe's presence to the bandage around his head. The two tended to prefer not being in one another's company, however, perhaps due in part to the instinctive tensing that occurred in everyone else present whenever they were. Every _other_ mind in the room was always on the topic, it seemed. 

Conversation with Warren was especially interesting. A few days after everyone returned from the moon, things seemed to be settling down when Warren happened to give an account of his last encounter with Apocalypse. Stryfe's roar of "You just LEFT him there ALIVE?" rattled the windows, and he was all for going back in the remote hope of finding and finishing off the Egyptian External. 

Cable, frankly, could sympathize. All hearers, however, seemed more of the opinion that Stryfe was simply overreacting. Stryfe went back anyway, surreptitiously, in the course of a series of excursions that Cable realized with a kind of morbid thrill were primarily aimed at retrieving or deactivating all specimens of Legacy. It would appear that the plague had been released, in his own timeline, sometime very close to Stryfe's death.

Well, that only made sense, if Stryfe had thought of it as a "legacy." But hadn't Xavier named it? Maybe Xavier had known more than he was telling. He usually did.

The relatively bland documentary unreeling itself sedately against mind-blanketing liquid silver-white suddenly grew more vivid, resolving with a feeling of sliding into place from summaries and generalities and samples -- all pervaded by mixed apprehension, resentment, and cautious hope from Stryfe, and by blithe joy from Illyana -- into a specific setting and event, at first glance far too serenely domestic for any real drama. 

Nathan was almost made dizzy for a moment as he noticed the plurality of viewpoints, both physical and mental -- views from opposite directions that somehow left the laws of perspective perfectly intact, thoughts and emotions from separate people alternating or jostling together. 

He was only disoriented, but wondered briefly how long it took non-telepaths to adjust to the divergences -- before surrendering to the fascination the scene almost seemed to hold for the device itself.

**********

Stryfe was sitting in a comfortable, deep armchair with a book to which he was paying limited attention. Scott and Jean were sharing the sofa and, judging from the quantity of newsprint, three or four different newspapers. Piotr was painting the scene. Stryfe appeared to be trying to ignore him.

Illyana was perched behind her big brother, leaning on his back to watch him paint and sniffling intermittently with a winter cold. It was getting boring, though, and she wanted a lap. And Piotr was busy, and Scott's and Jean's both had papers in them.

She headed over to the armchair, picking up a slightly battered copy of _The Velveteen Rabbit_ on her way, and climbed into the large silver-haired man's lap. He wasn't doing anything, just staring into the fire more than he looked at his own book...

The person who owned the lap jumped and looked down in shock. "Read to me?" Illyana asked with her best irresistibly cold-roughened voice and pleading eyes.

"Read?" Stryfe asked blankly, still lost in a strange land.

Illyana held up the book. "I'm bored and I feel yucky..."

Stryfe took the book, as he was obviously supposed to do, and tried to restrain the half-afraid nervousness at having his personal space invaded without so much as a "please." "Read... this aloud?"

At least she had gotten the word right; for a minute she'd almost wondered. Illyana squirmed slightly, sniffed again, and nestled against him. "Please?" 

Stryfe fought back the instincts. She was a small, sick child. He did not need to check her for weapons.

She rubbed the back of her hand under her nose. He wasn't answering. "Everybody else is busy," she said carefully. "Please read to me?" Illyana squirmed again and scooted a bit sideways. His lap was awfully hard, like he was tense. Her lip trembled slightly. "If... you don't want me here, I'll go..."

If he didn't comply, they'd think he wasn't trying. How hard could it be? Well, mortifying, but he didn't see much of a choice. If you didn't treat sick children nicely, you were a Bad Person. "Fine. But bear in mind, as English is neither your first language or mine, I'm not sure how much you will be able to understand." 

Illyana nodded, a little reassured. She didn't mention that she knew the story by heart already. He might refuse then. She nestled down. 

Piotr, who had looked over first in guilt and then in some alarm at Illyana's previous two comments, relaxed slightly. 

Just as he got the book open to the first page, Illyana picked up her head again from where she'd rested it on his rib cage. Her nose was running slightly. "Are you sure you don't mind?" she asked anxiously, and rather stuffily. "You're..." she hesitated briefly, "tense."

Jean looked over and gave a very tiny, approving smile. Not that Stryfe was looking her way. She telekinetically lofted the Kleenex box over to the table beside the armchair. It looked like it might be needed.

Stryfe looked down at the small blonde child and wondered how in the world such a creature had survived Limbo, based on what he'd been able to find out about the place. He looked at her face, looked at the box of tissues that had just floated over to him, and tried not to grimace in disgust. Fortunately, telekinesis did mean he didn't actually have to HOLD the tissue to wipe her nose.... The point became moot, as she took the tissue and did it herself anyway. 

She was still looking at him expectantly with gigantic, slightly worried dark-blue eyes. Oath, she expected him to answer her... and she'd just announced to the entire ROOM that he wasn't relaxed. 

"Just a little uncomfortable." That was definitely the truth. He lifted her a smidge telekinetically and made a small show of rearranging himself. _What do I do if she falls off?_ "There, much better." Forcing himself to relax, he looked at the book. Illyana settled herself between his arms so he could still turn the pages, and looked expectant.

Horribly aware that Jean was watching his every move, he tentatively opened the book. There seemed to be... an awful lot of pictures.

Illyana settled down anew and leaned her head on Stryfe's chest, sighing happily at the sight of the first familiar picture. It felt so much better, having somebody nice and warm to sit on when you were sick.

He hadn't started yet. Perhaps she should make polite conversation; he hadn't read to her before, after all. "Do you like rabbits?" she asked, craning her head back so she could see his face. Or at least his chin.

Stryfe thought quickly. He did remember tasting rabbit once... but that wasn't what she was asking. "I... am not sure. I haven't met one." 

"I have." Her neck was starting to hurt a little bit, so she looked back at the book. "Some of them are to eat, and some of them are for pets. The pet ones are cuddly and they like carrots. Toy ones aren't really either one, but they're still cuddly. But I'd rather have my Bamf."

Stryfe took a deep breath and recited to himself, "This is a small child. She is not a threat. And I am supposed to be 'nice' to her," silently like a mantra, and finally located the story's first words. And blinked at them.

"There was once a vel- velveteen rabbit, and in the beginning he was really splendid. He was fat and... bunchy, as a rabbit should be; his coat was spotted brown and white, he had real thread whiskers, and his ears were lined with pink sateen." Stryfe winced slightly and eyed the picture. It looked far too Christmassy for his comfort.

Illyana always liked commenting in between lines, and only hushed if it really bothered people. "He was cute. But not cuddled yet." She patted one of the large arms she was sitting between. "That comes later."

"I'm sure it does." 

On the couch, Scott looked up curiously. Then he grinned and looked back down, pretending not to notice. Fighting back a blush (chaos bringers don't blush, even if he wasn't being one actively anymore), Stryfe continued. "On Christmas morning, when he sat wedged in the top of the Boy's stocking, with a sprig of holly between his paws, the effect was charming." The room's other occupants were certainly liking it. Illyana didn't seem to notice.

"Holly's a funny plant. It's very prickly. But people like decorating with it anyway."

Illyana decided that Stryfe was pausing longer than made much sense. Maybe he would rather just talk. She didn't mind, as long as she could sit and snuggle up on his lap. Or maybe she ought to quit interrupting the story? She looked up at him again, coughing a little bit. "I'll stop talking in between if you don't like me to," she chirped meekly. 

Jean, smiling fondly into her newspaper, tried to squelch a hint of disappointment. The "in between" conversations sounded as if they might be VERY interesting to listen in on. Granted her son looked utterly mortified... but then, he was so cute that way...

Which was a rather unmotherly sentiment, perhaps, but... no it wasn't, she decided firmly, recalling the amusement with which her own mother had periodically told embarrassing stories.

Stryfe closed his eyes for a second and thought of past battles he really wasn't supposed to be proud of anymore. _I can win against a book._ "I will keep reading; say what you like. It's your story."

Illyana, ill as she felt, beamed up at him, a sudden wash of happiness going through her that he'd read to her and let her talk too. "Thank you!"

There was probably no psi on earth who could have completely blocked out perception of quite such a spontaneous emotional rush, despite the deceptive simplicity of its cause. At any rate, if there was one, it wasn't Stryfe. Not when his primary focus the past few minutes had been keeping his own emotions _in_. He blinked down at the small golden head.

Holding onto the contented feeling and taking a deep breath, Stryfe set out to do war for his small patron. He struggled through the opening paragraphs, then rallied magnificently at the prejudice of the more modern toys. If he ignored the childish language, it was a rather nice metaphor.

"They weren't very nice," Illyana inserted, naively but accurately enough. "I don't much like them. But maybe they didn't know any better."

Jean noticed the abrupt improvement as Stryfe progressed more comfortably when he reached one of the more negative portions of the book, and raised an eyebrow. Well, perhaps it was only to be expected. 

"Maybe they were jealous, and tried to make themselves feel more important by focusing on what they thought made them special," Stryfe said with a restrained hint of irony and a baleful glance in Jean's direction.

Illyana looked up at him with a rather more considering expression than he would have expected from such a tiny face. "Do people do that a lot?"

"More often than they think they do."

She looked down at the book again. "I guess the other toys didn't think that was what they were doing either. They really thought they were better, didn't they?" She sighed. "So they were mean. That's very sad."

The other adults in the room exchanged looks.

Stryfe noted the looks and bit back a comment on how it was sometimes quite fun, simply clearing his throat and moving onto comparative Realness.

Illyana snuggled down. This had always been one of her favorite parts. 

"...'The Boy's Uncle made me Real,' he said. 'That was a great many years ago; but once you are Real you can't become unreal again. It lasts for always.'"

"Are people ever not Real?"

The question was completely innocent, but managed to send the entire room into silence and immobility but for the crackle of the fireplace. 

"No," Stryfe said flatly. "People are always real. Everyone. Always."

"That's what I thought," Illyana replied, relaxing a bit more again. "And I guess if they weren't I'd just have to go love them so they got that way."

Jean pressed a hand hard to her mouth behind the newspaper, trying to quell both the urge to laugh that bubbled up behind her lips and the tears that sprang to her eyes.

It was very hard to strike Stryfe quite speechless, but the unfamiliar feeling racing though him stole all the words away. For a moment he just stared down at the strange little girl who wasn't at all as he'd thought she was. "That... that would probably work quite fast on people."

"You wouldn't even need to use the magic from the fairy," Illyana agreed. "They're already people."

"Fairy?" Stryfe asked weakly.

"Keep reading."

**********

He did, but Cable shook his head and quit watching before the book was over. Seeing Stryfe read sentimental children's literature aloud with a small child on his lap beat out a lot of the weirder universes he'd run across lately, for sheer incongruity. Had his clone _really_ thought he'd get kicked out for _not_ reading to Illyana? 

Apparently the practice kept up, though. Mindful of the fact that the people whose past he was watching were only a few feet away, Cable tried not to snicker aloud at either the renditions of assorted Dr. Seuss books, or at Stryfe's consternation when the nickname "Snowflake" first slipped off his tongue. 

_Pride and Prejudice_ and _Jane Eyre_ surprised him slightly, though he wondered if the title of the first hadn't gotten Stryfe curious. Nathan admitted grudgingly to himself that he shared a certain level of admiration with the rest of those who observed the reading aloud of _The Silmarillion_, _The Hobbit_, and the Lord of the Rings trilogy -- along with _War and Peace_ (in Russian), _Alice in Wonderland_, and _Les Miserables_ all in the course of one snowbound week. 

It was impressive as a feat of sheer vocal endurance, even if Illyana did join in for some of the "voices." She could in fact read English quite well; she just liked being read to out loud. As well as reading out loud -- she really made an excellent Galadriel. 

Cable did stop and listen at full length to a lively discussion of correct pronunciation and accent based on Tolkien's own explanations, and to every song Illyana lilted through in the elf-tongue. She sang very prettily.

He couldn't help noticing that the little girl shared none of the uneasy suspicion or discomfort about Stryfe's presence, accepting it as a matter of course and -- after a little initial diffidence about asking him to do things -- treating him with the same sweetly confiding trust and naturalness she gave Piotr and her other favorite adults. 

Despite clear evidence from his own immediate past that no such thing had happened, the only reason Nathan could watch this without waiting for and dreading the moment Stryfe turned on her in some horrifying fashion was the device's insistence on showing him the timeline as much from Stryfe's perspective as Illyana's. 

The former Chaos-Bringer had no intention of harming her. The irony of the Legacy release in Nathan's own timeline was wrenching, but this Stryfe actually seemed to be getting fond of the child, even protective. She even knew he had been a villain, and as long as he wasn't being one anymore it made no difference to her. He wasn't the only one, after all. 

Nathan suspected Illyana might not really have a clear sense of scale, but she genuinely wasn't concerned. And Stryfe, much to his surprise, instead of taking advantage of the lack of concern for dastardly purposes -- seemed almost unconsciously grateful for it. 

Even if he wasn't always particularly gracious.

**********


	3. 3/10

_Disclaimer: Marvel's properties are Marvel's, used without explicit permission. The Shadowlands concept in this context was set up by Alicia, and is used with explicit permission. Enjoy._

**Unexpected Companions  
by Persephone  
Chapter 3/10**

It took a few months of more than one type of healing, but Stryfe did start going on missions with the X-Men. Not ones where media attention was probable -- that would have been foolish. It would have been equally foolish, though, never to take advantage of a high-octane psi with considerable combat experience, and a certain general nervousness didn't necessarily mean they didn't trust him to cover their backs if need be.

He kept "Stryfe" as his codename. 

An assault by the Shadow King that didn't seem to have any precise analogue in the watching Cable's timeline gave the X-Men in this alternate one reason to take Stryfe along. The telepaths, bolstered by the minds of their teammates, succeeded after a lengthy, unglamorous, and exhausting struggle that came down to a battle of wills more than purely of power in forcing a retreat. 

Cable skimmed the battle itself, mildly curious regarding the strategy applied but allowing the scryer to slip past it to the aftermath. If it wanted to show him reactions or something, which it frequently seemed inclined to, let it. He was becoming very interested in what went on in this Stryfe's head, and while telepathic battles could of course occur in infinite variety, the basic principles of fighting the Shadow King always seemed the same.

In the course of the fight, however, Stryfe had early on come near to succumbing; dark moods came naturally to him and he was more susceptible than he would have thought to the Shadow King's wiles despite all his skill at shielding. Jean's fiery-red telepathic call had cut the darkness and blazed across his mind with a plea and given him something to hold onto at the last second. Sheer inherent obstinacy had also been of help.

The battle had still left him exhausted physically, mentally, and psionically, the last two of which were not as much the same thing as most people thought, as well as deeply and secretly ashamed of how near he'd come to panicking at the first shadowy tendril that had eased through his shields and the hissed thoughts that had accompanied it. 

He knew it had to do with Apocalypse's attempt to possess him; he'd never been able or even all that willing to remember the details, but had realized sickeningly as he recovered that that was what had nearly happened. He still wasn't sure why the attempt had failed and left him alive. But knowing _why_ he'd been afraid didn't really make him feel any better about it.

Nor did being half-ignored afterwards. Jean had actually hugged him and Scott squeezed his shoulder, but very quickly, almost in passing, on their way to see to other people who were probably more congenial. And who hadn't, to his knowledge, nearly gotten subverted. Or possessed. McCoy had given him a once-over and ordered rest, which Stryfe thought an excessively obvious prescription. Not that he was going to _admit_ he felt like collapsing.

Truth to tell, he wasn't exactly being ignored. Most of the X-Men were as exhausted as he, or nearly so, and many had somewhat more severe injuries than the bruises he'd sustained, though none were life-threatening. His parents had been in a hurry, naturally, to check on assorted teammates as well as innocent bystanders.

Equally naturally, his instinctive reinforcement of his psi-shields when Jean embraced him had led her to believe that he wanted a measure of privacy after the difficulties he'd encountered, perhaps to meditate. So when he had retreated to his own room afterwards, she had resisted the urge to check on him. 

He didn't know she was fighting her own instincts in trying to be considerate, and accordingly he retired, lay down, and brooded. Certainly he had done everything (except lock the door or say it straight out) to imply that he wished to be left alone, but he still, illogically enough, resented the fact that no one came to look for him.

They never had. They'd sent him to the future, a miserable future perpetually oppressed and usually at war with itself well beyond the petty conflicts of the present, apparently with some woman they'd never seen before, and left him there to be raised by the monster who'd put him in danger in the first place. 

The people who had adopted Cable didn't come to look for him, either. They'd turned up eventually, but as far as his recollection of that day went, it had been some sort of assassination attempt. They certainly hadn't taken him along when they left. It made him sick, thinking how proud he'd been to be Apocalypse's heir. At least those _peasants_ he'd so looked down on had apparently _cared._

Some sort of Askani, they'd been. He had gotten the vague impression somewhere along the line that the woman had possibly been the one who brought him back, though there was also a certain nagging familiarity to Jean that he couldn't quite sort out. Maybe a descendant. 

He realized he was staring blankly at the ceiling and shut his eyes wearily. It didn't really make that much difference, and he wasn't likely to figure it out lying in a bedroom in the twentieth century. The point was, nobody was coming to look for him _now_, either. Tears pricked at the corners of his eyes; he tilted his head back on the pillow and succeeded in driving them away.

Stryfe groaned inwardly as he realized all his internal mental and emotional defenses were in a shambles, and the shields he'd so carefully reinforced were fading in and out ever so slightly. The realization that the Shadow King had gotten to him worse than he'd thought produced a shudder; an uncomfortable number of things he didn't like to think about were floating around far too freely.

Maybe it was just as well nobody was coming. He didn't want to see them anyway, he told himself. If they came it would only be to bring recriminations of how close he had come to being the Shadow King's next host because he couldn't control his fear. 

A lecture on teamwork, maybe, and how it wasn't supposed to involve almost betraying the rest of the _team_ out of panic, or distracting somebody else by having to use them as an anchor to avoid the aforesaid betrayal. A lecture on how they'd tried trusting him and he'd come a hairsbreadth from letting them down.

He really didn't want to hear that. Right. They could just stay wherever they all were, and leave him to try to put his shields back together and ignore the creeping terror that had stayed with him. With another muffled groan, he began the process. If he didn't attend to the psionic aftereffects of Farouk's last attack now, he wouldn't be able to use his telepathy without being practically blinded by pain for a week. So he'd better fix it.

Alone.

He propped himself up long enough to punch the pillow, hard enough the entire bedframe creaked. Then he flopped back down, deciding that blowing off steam wasn't really worth the effort, and tried not to writhe as he returned to quelling the nauseous roiling in his mind. And stomach, by this point, but that was probably merely a side effect of the mental disturbance.

Not as if he wanted an audience anyway. The fact that calming down and acquiring a better mood would do as much as if not more than telepathic repair to counteract damage caused by the Shadow King, due to that entity's preferred and rather nasty methods, was pushed fairly far down in his consciousness and kept being mistaken for an unpleasant memory and shoved back down whenever it tried to bob up.

His shields cooperated reasonably well, at least initially, but they weren't going to remain stable until he settled his own mind down internally. Agony nearly took his breath away as he tripped into a stray memory, of the time on the moon when he shouted at his parents, to look at him, at the ravages of scorn and lack of caring, and found them fallen unconscious moments before. Frustration. 

He locked the memory down and tried reminding himself they probably didn't pass out on purpose; he should have put more air inside the shield if he wanted to talk to them longer. And they did take him home with them later. _For what_, he thought nastily to himself. _And even if they do "care," do you really think they won't "scorn" you after this?_ But he'd tried, he had tried.... _So?_

Apparently he wasn't even worth mocking; he'd barely been spoken to afterwards. People had looked at him, and then looked away quickly with that uneasy expression he'd seen so often in the past few months even when they were being quite pleasant. He was very good at inspiring fear, usually, but when he didn't mean to it got very annoying, and right now the memory of every nervous glance cut like a whipstroke.

Stryfe gave the internal defenses and the shields they fed a savage jerk and twisted another segment into place. He certainly didn't want to sense what they thought of him, or risk projecting next time he happened to see Jean! Or worse yet, Betsy; Jean at least made some effort not to look amused, and didn't give that irritating toss of her head whenever he was driven to snarling that he wanted to be let alone.

Not that anybody was likely to bother coming. Maybe he'd finally driven them to giving up on him. He wouldn't be surprised. They never really liked him anyway.

As he hadn't been monitoring the hall, the knock at his door startled him. 

"What?!" he called irritably, nudging his shields to make sure they wouldn't fall over or something and proceeding to scan. Illyana. 

The door opened without further ado, and a small blonde head poked in. "There you are. When you weren't anywhere else, Dr. McCoy said he'd told you to rest, so I came to look here." 

He propped himself on one elbow, then decided it was too much trouble and lay back again. "Did you want something?" he asked grouchily, in a tone intended to imply that he distinctly hoped she didn't.

"I wanted to see you," she said, as if it should have been the most obvious thing in the world. After a moment's consideration, Illyana padded across the floor, kicked off her shoes, and perched on the edge of the bed, _Winnie the Pooh_ clutched to her chest. 

"Why?"

"Because." Feeling this needed more elaboration, she added, "I felt like it. And you'd just been in a fight, so I wanted to make sure you were okay, and you'd disappeared." She held up the book. "You could read to me. I like it, and you cuddle nice." After a moment's pause for contemplation of grammar, she tacked on, "Ly."

He inched slightly sideways, away from her. "I... It has been a very long day. I don't feel like reading to you," he told her bluntly. The "Just go away; I want to be left alone" got caught somewhere back of his throat and didn't make it out.

In its absence, Illyana took Stryfe's motion away from the side of the bed as an invitation, and climbed onto it, folding her feet up beside her. "Then I can read to you. I thought you might be tired, so I brought a book I know is all words I can pronounce."

Stryfe gave the child an incredulous look, which she met quite serenely. "If you insist."

She crossed her legs, somehow managing to sit bolt upright on the mattress, and opened the book. Then she leaned over and looked at him, and sighed. "You're in a bad mood, aren't you?" she diagnosed, a little reprovingly. 

"No, not at all," he said with heavy sarcasm. "I'm perfectly happy. You might even say ecstatic." Something felt as if it tore inside him. "That's why I came up here _by myself_ to get away from everybody who might want to tell me how badly I almost failed them during the battle!"

Illyana regarded him very gravely. "I asked Piotr, and he said, 'We won, Snowflake, and your comrade Stryfe did very well against him.' So, I don't think it sounds like you need to be worried." Her imitation of her brother's slightly stronger accent and manner of speaking, as she quoted him, was precise. "But you sound like you need a hug." 

He was caught off guard and dumbfounded by this announcement, which meant he didn't have time to do anything before she slid down and put small arms around his neck.

Now what was he supposed to do? The obvious expected response was to return the embrace. Well, he'd held or carried Illyana often enough before, by this time, and it was hardly the first time she had hugged him. The practice had its moments. He'd been madly envious most of his life of people who found such things natural and common -- but he still didn't seek out occasions for it. Had never yet initiated it. Still, he liked Illyana, and a rebuff would hurt her, so he freed the arm she was half lying on, and wrapped it around the small body.

After all, he didn't really want her to leave; Illyana was a startlingly cheerful, carefree little girl even though she could also be remarkably serious at times, and perceptively intelligent beyond her years. 

At least, Stryfe thought she was; he was not widely experienced in analyzing the normal development of children, but he was fairly certain it didn't include a memory which, when she chose to pay attention, rivaled the eidetic retention of some telepaths -- and with better comprehension. Her schooling was an informal affair, at the moment, and seemed likely to continue in that vein, since between her own reading and spontaneous or planned tutoring from assorted parties, she was well ahead of what might be expected in any school they could think of -- but haphazardly enough that placing her in an actual grade would have been essentially impossible.

Now, however, it wasn't the girl's academic intelligence that made Stryfe want her to stay; it was the bright innocence and sympathy and _trust_, and the secure happiness of her mind that seeped blithely across his shields even with the repairs he'd just made. 

He didn't want to hurt her.

And he suddenly thought of what might have happened to that trusting, happy mind if the Shadow King had turned him against her, and his throat closed up in horror... and guilt. Stryfe realized then that it wasn't only the scolding he wanted to avoid; the shame wasn't only at his failure. These people had grown into his soul, even if he still made them uneasy and vice versa; he no longer wanted to harm them, even actively wanted not to. 

But he very nearly had, through an old weakness. He swallowed sickly. He would deserve it if they did turn their backs on him now. 

Still, what Illyana had reported of her brother did not sound like the words of one who blamed him for what he had almost done. Piotr was still suspicious about Stryfe, especially about his little sister's association with the man; it was surprising he had let Illyana come up here. Then again, she wasn't all that easy to keep track of sometimes, even for a telepath, and Piotr wasn't one. 

But why would he have said Stryfe had done "very well" in the battle? Perhaps to protect Illyana from the knowledge? But that would be foolish: keeping the knowledge from her would only make the girl more likely to return to the side of a man who might betray her. 

Of course. "Piotr isn't a telepath, Illyana. I doubt he knows what happened. You would have received a different answer, I imagine, had you asked Jean."

Illyana laughed. She _laughed_. "Silly. Piotr can tell who won or not. And Jean was right there, and she nodded. She told me you didn't want to be bothered right now, too, but I decided it would be okay to come because I wasn't going to bother you," she prattled, then added ingenuously, "I'm not bothering you, am I?"

It was Stryfe's turn to laugh, if gruffly. Maybe not _always_ perceptive -- or maybe well able to ignore selectively. "No... no, you aren't bothering me." He found, a little to his surprise, that he was telling the truth, and decided not to mention that her arrival had annoyed, or "bothered" him at first. "I -- I am glad you came."

"Good," she said decisively, and wriggled free to sit up again and retrieve the book. His side felt slightly cold where she had moved away. "Now, since you are supposed to be resting, I will read to you, and then you can come down and eat dinner afterwards." She frowned slightly at him before adding, "Unless you're still too tired; then I'll bring you something."

Stryfe wondered for a few moments if he would do worse to go down and face everyone, or hide his shame up here and act as if he were too weak to have recovered yet. The latter would put off the consequences, perhaps, but it would be cowardly -- not to mention that it would make him look very bad, unable even to recuperate as quickly as others with worse injuries. It was kind of Jean, he supposed, that she apparently had not yet publicized his failings.

He stopped worrying about the matter for the moment as Illyana began reading, her voice and contentment both oddly soothing, and he allowed himself to think that perhaps things would be all right after all.

When another tap at the door revealed its source to be Jean, come looking for them both, all the guilt and dread came flooding back and knotted itself in his stomach as he hastily returned to the neglected business of repairing his shields -- finding them in surprisingly better shape for the time he'd ignored them -- and sat up. 

Jean had been smiling when she entered, at the scene, but her brows drew together in confusion as her son tensed and sat up with an expression that suggested he'd prefer to face a firing squad. "Chris? What on Earth's the matter?" She hesitated, then added with an attempt at lightness, "I didn't come to check up on your shields; if you want a hand, though... or to help with mine...." She trailed off at the bleak look he gave her.

"I neither require help with my shields nor am likely to be much use to yours," he replied stiffly. What kind of joke was this? "As if you don't know what's the matter...." He gritted his teeth and forced himself to continue. "If you've come to tell me I'm... off the team, get on with it."

Jean emanated shocked bewilderment and looked completely flabbergasted. "What?" she finally managed faintly. "Why would you be off the team? I mean, given the option I don't think anybody would suggest sending you out on a mission until you've had a chance to rest -- you had a rough time, I know -- but that's pretty much standard." 

Stryfe flinched. A rough time. That was, he supposed, one way of putting it, but that wasn't really the point. He gently suggested to Illyana that she run off and let them talk; he didn't think he wanted her to see this. She didn't move. He sighed, lifted her firmly off the bed, and glanced pointedly toward the door. She sat down just outside it. He gave up and lifted his eyes back to Jean's. "If you had known what could happen," he said quietly and as evenly as he could, "you would not have risked my presence."

His mother bent a green gaze on him and tilted her head. "If this is about the Shadow King's targeting you," she said carefully, "then... well, we would have been more careful about telling you what to expect, I guess, and I'd have tried to keep an eye on you a little better in case you needed support; we could hardly have left one of our best telepaths behind. Not against him. That kind of attack is... very unpleasant, I know, but it's a risk we all take going up against him. I _am_ sorry about --" 

She broke off and looked at him intently as it dawned on her that he wasn't simply upset over the trauma, or being accusatory because they had perhaps relied too much on his power and experience, and apparently underestimated the backup they needed to provide him. He was expecting accusations from her, not apologies, and she made a hasty mental shift to consider whether blaming oneself illogically might be genetic. "Excuse me, I seem to be missing something. Maybe I should go back to my first question: what, exactly, is the matter?"

Utterly confused by now, Stryfe stared at her. "I came very close to betraying you. All of you." He hesitated and then plowed onward. "I nearly handed him the victory because -- because I was afraid," he admitted harshly. "You knew that. I... gather from what you've said so far you aren't actually planning to send me away; could we perhaps have the inevitable lecture on teamwork sooner rather than later?"

"You didn't 'nearly hand' him anything," Jean said gently. "And you certainly did not betray us. What you came close to was having your defenses broken -- by a very powerful, very insidious enemy. But you fought back; when I called you, you _answered_; you didn't give in. And you made it back. To help your teammates, so I'm not quite sure why you're expecting one of Scott's legendary lectures on the subject." 

Stryfe shook his head at her irritably as she came to sit beside his bed in a nearby chair, carefully _not_ invading his personal space without an invitation (unlike Illyana, who had never realized she needed one). "Because. I didn't do my part; I put every last one of you at risk because _I_ couldn't keep myself from panicking." And he loathed himself for it. 

Jean frowned in concern, and made no secret of the fact that she was calling Scott to come up and relaying the conversation. "I can't say I'm not surprised to hear you say you panicked, to be honest. It's not like you. But as soon as you 'heard' me, you resisted him and you succeeded. If you hadn't... well, you'd hardly have been the first of us he ever got to do his bidding. But you did."

"If I hadn't... Jean, I would have been his new host." He couldn't quite help shuddering at the thought. "And... you would not have had a chance. Because you would have tried to _talk_, instead of seeing you had to kill me and doing it right away." He knew that, knew that even if he'd lost completely and been taken over, they would have tried to get him back, and it would have been their downfall. So why had he really thought they would simply throw him out? That wouldn't happen. It didn't fit. But the recriminations he _could_ logically expect weren't materializing either.

"Maybe," she said noncommittally. "But might-have-beens don't really count in this game, do they? You didn't fail us, Chris. As soon as I gave you any kind of support -- if you can even call it that; I was --" 

He interrupted. "You shouldn't have had to; I shouldn't have been so... weak... as to need your help and distract you so you couldn't put _your_ full strength against him."

"Maybe you _do_ need that lecture on teamwork," Scott said wryly from just outside the door. He stepped over Illyana, casting her a mildly perplexed look before crossing the room to lean on the foot of the bed. "The whole point of it is that the team works better _as_ a team than as a collection of individuals fighting as if they're each alone. Synergy."

Stryfe wavered. Was Scott saying they _didn't_ blame him for almost falling? Had Jean really been trying to say they shouldn't have let him get into that position? He still should have been able to handle it. 

Jean leaned towards him. "It's unusual _not_ to struggle, fighting the Shadow King. Everybody has a dark side. As I was trying to say when you cut me off, the call you used as a lifeline was me asking you for help; I was in trouble then too, and it scared me half to death realizing you were." She grinned slightly. "Turned out I didn't need to worry, it seems." 

**********

Glittering milk swirled around the images and made them only that, images again, as Illyana unfolded herself from the floor and came back into the room to bounce on the bed. Nathan welcomed the receding. There was something unsettling about the entire idea of Stryfe feeling guilty. Not that the man _shouldn't_ feel guilty, but Cable had always thought it was probably an alien concept to him.

Still a bit unnerved, Nathan let the tale of their timeline wander and alight where it would. The scenes seemed to swoop and spin, eventually reaching a sudden, sharp focus as a young girl's bedroom snapped to fill his vision and the girl herself sat up in bed with a cry. 

A soft one, not so loud as it sounded in her own ears or mind as it echoed within shields that shouldn't have been there, as memories filled her head, falling into place, and she _knew_.

She was Magik again.

Illyana doubled over in her bed for a moment, then straightened, shut her eyes in an expression of mingled despair and determination, and stretched out her hand.

With a sword in it.

Silver crept up her arm as she watched, eyes wide, young face terribly pale. She scrambled out of bed and teleported.

Cable had no idea how long it really took her to return. He was carried along as if in a whirlwind as the skills, knowledge, traumas and friendships of all the time from when Illyana was snatched into Limbo until she threw herself back to heal the breach he himself had nearly been sacrificed to make permanent -- flooded back to her, warring with her brighter memories of the last four years, and lent her a grim purpose.

She found Belasco and took Limbo back, staying her hand once again and letting him go, face twisting as he begged her for mercy. She wished very distinctly that she had killed him before he had a chance to speak, and recoiled from herself at the thought.

She fought those of the other inhabitants of Limbo who challenged her rule, and defeated them all, and the blood they spilled slid off her armor as if it had never touched it. 

And then she returned to her own room, and the clock flicked from the minute on which she'd left to the next.

As Cable glimpsed it and the young queen who never wanted to rule -- oath, she was younger than he'd been when he'd first killed Apocalypse; she couldn't deserve to have this laid on her, but deserving never made any difference, did it? -- glanced at the time and started to alight on her bed, he was thrown into another view, the transition jarring.

**********

Stryfe climbed the stairs, wondering idly why -- as many times as the house had been destroyed to one extent or another -- Xavier kept rebuilding it with so many stairs. Though the basements at least made sense; they tended to stay relatively intact. Not that he himself particularly minded, but surely it looked odd to anyone in the public who might notice, that a wheelchair-bound man insisted on living in a multiple-story house that kept being torn down? 

Then again, noticing things about Xavier was probably not an activity greatly indulged in by much of the populace....

He headed towards Illyana's room, having volunteered to wake her. The early breakfast was one of her favorites, and if Bobby had gone he would probably have iced her sheets.

He tapped at her door and received no answer. He knocked louder. No response. Stryfe frowned. She must be fairly sound asleep? He pushed the door open.

And stopped and stared.

Illyana sat on her bed with her feet pulled up onto the edge of her mattress, all clad in silver-bright armor that glittered in the morning sun. One arm lay across her knees, her head resting on it and eyes fixed on the wall. 

Her other hand clutched the hilt of a sword, and she was struggling desperately not to cry.

Stryfe took all this in, head spinning with the implications and the worry that perhaps he should have mentioned his concern that this could happen -- he'd thought of it -- but he hadn't thought of Illyana reacting quite this way, and now that omission seemed foolish. He took a step forward. "Illyana."

She jumped, and looked at him for the first time, then snatched up an empty vase from the table by her bed and hurled it at him. "Go away and leave me alone! I don't want -- I don't -- don't LOOK at me that way!" She turned her head sharply away and resumed her earlier posture, shaking slightly.

Stryfe wavered. What was he supposed to do? What _could_ he do? He knew better than any other how armor could turn to a deathtrap. 

Whenever he'd said, "Go away and leave me alone," he'd been miserable if people actually did.

He took the few steps to the bed, and set the vase he'd caught back in its place. When no further missiles seemed to be forthcoming, he sat down beside her. She didn't move.

Very hesitantly, fighting decades of habitual reserve (or, to be more honest, hostile standoffishness), Stryfe tried putting a hand on her back in what he hoped would be a comforting gesture.

Then she did move, suddenly, smooth metal sliding past his hand as she leaned toward him, and -- somehow it almost seemed natural -- he found his arm around her shoulder, holding the trembling girl close despite the cold stiffness of the armor.

"Illyana?"

"I remember," she whispered.

Stryfe had the feeling it was an inane question, but he asked it anyway. "Remember what?"

"Being Magik. I am Magik. I'm --" she broke off in a strangled sob and clung with her arms around his neck. He eyed the Soulsword a little uneasily, since she still had the hilt in her hand and this put the blade very close to his head, then recollected something about it being intangible to anyone not magical by nature or trained in magic, which to the best of his knowledge described him quite accurately.

He patted her shoulder, wondering if he should call someone who was good at being comforting. It really wasn't his specialty, and as far as he could tell she was just getting more upset, which didn't speak well for his powers of extemporaneous comfort.

Illyana gulped and got control of her voice again. "I woke up this morning and started remembering things from Limbo and being part of the New Mutants. And the bloodstones are back, and my Soulsword. Somebody else had it -- it told me where it had been, Kitty and then she gave it away and it got passed around, but it was drawn back to me as soon as I was a sorceress again."

"It's --" he began. It was what? All right? Hardly that, clearly. "Not the end of the world," he ended rather lamely. "I'm sure it's complicated, having two sets of memories for the same ages, but you'll manage, and...."

"I don't want to remember," she choked out. "Limbo was -- was horrible. Whether I'm in charge of it or not, maybe worse when I am, and I went and t-took it back from Belasco so he couldn't be still trying to let the Dark Ones through."

Stryfe wasn't completely following this, and his attempt to reach into her mind and find out what was going on bounced. He could probably break the shields, but that was a little violent given the circumstances, so he resigned himself to noncomprehension and stopped trying to propose solutions, instead just listening as she spilled tears and explanations that ranged from cryptic to incoherent. 

Of course, he'd probably said things about his life that made just as little sense to her, or less, and she had never complained. 

He finally patted her on the shoulder as she wound down and started to relax, and ventured to suggest breakfast. "It will have been ready by now; if you wait much longer it will get cold."

Illyana sniffled and leaned her head on his shoulder. "I guess I'll come. Give me a minute." She got up and started toward the door; Stryfe blinked, and when he looked back at her the sword and armor were gone. She turned and looked over her shoulder. "You go on; I need to wash my face." A very shaky breath. "And thank you."

**********

Unfortunately, over breakfast the memories proved not to be through with Illyana. She was calm enough by the time she came down that no one commented, or even noted the concerned look Stryfe gave her across the orange juice pitcher. 

But midway through the meal, she dropped her fork and went pale again, her mind assaulting her with images of twisted landscapes, wild stepping discs, laughing demons, New York City gone mad, and.... 

... And --

-- And a child, no, other children too, murdered, and one who lived, but barely, who was about to be sacrificed --

-- Madelyne's and Scott's child, in the hands of the Goblin Queen --

-- Almost sacrificed --

-- Almost killed, by _her_ servants, rebels it was true, but still hers, who still should have been under her control.

Stryfe and Storm both rose and started towards her as she buried her face in her hands, feeling them cold as ice against the near-feverish heat of her cheeks. "No. Oh, no... what I did to him..." 

"Whom?" Ororo. Dear Ororo, who'd taught her, who had tried to teach her clean magic, whom she'd had to kill -- no, that was another Ororo, not this one. 

Illyana shuddered, the visions merciless. It was hard to concentrate on the here and now; she knew only that she'd been responsible for horrors, and there was one survivor out there, to whom she bore a debt she could probably never wipe out.... 

Her voice was desperate. "Christopher. Madelyne's and Scott's baby. It was my fault, letting the demons out of control enough for them to go after Maddie. He's the only one of those kids who lived, I _owe_ him, my blood, my death, my life, almost anything -- where IS he?" She had to find him. 

"Uh... Illyana. I'm right here, but you don't --" Christopher? That was Chris... Christopher... not the right one; he didn't bear the invisible mark her instincts told her would have been left; she had to find the one who did.

"Not you!" she cried impatiently. "You weren't there, you've never been to Limbo --" She stumbled out of her chair, yanking out the Soulsword and letting the armor crawl over her all at once, oblivious to the shocked gazes of nearly every pair of eyes in the room and Stryfe's stricken expression, and betook herself to Limbo.

**********

Once there, she could find Christopher. Having been tied into a spell like that one, he should be practically a beacon for any competent sorcerer in Limbo. She knelt, a strange single-mindedness taking over and substituting for calm within the frantic urgency that possessed her, and scried. There.

Of course.

It was perfectly logical.

The baby hadn't been Stryfe-Christopher, so it had been Cable. 

He showed up like a beacon, indeed, or maybe more like a supernova. She'd made the mistake of setting the spell to glow when it found him, and had to spend a few minutes blinking before she could see anything but purple, bruise-like spots in front of her eyes.

Illyana sat back on her heels and waited for her vision to clear. She had to go to him, tell him what she'd done, what she owed -- and offer him the chance to take what she owed him. 

She drew a shuddering breath and grasped again at her control of Limbo. It was hard, not so much to make Limbo respond as to keep from responding too much to it, or keep it from responding too much to her. She wasn't completely sure which. 

Really, she supposed, the issue was controlling herself. She clenched a metaphorical fist around the precarious balance, reminded herself of what she had to do -- as if she could forget -- bit her lip hard, and called another stepping disc.

**********

_You weren't there; you've never been to Limbo._

_Scott's and Madelyne's baby._

_Not you! You weren't there._

Stryfe took a single, futile step toward where Illyana had stood, then stopped, mind reeling as her words echoed in his ears. 

_Scott's and Madelyne's baby._

_Not you._

His world, the life -- the _family_ he'd finally dared to believe he'd had, seemed to crash down around him. He wasn't Scott's and Madelyne's son, not really the child Scott and Jean had cared for and then given up.

He wasn't their child.

And that left only one possibility: Cable. Nathan. His nemesis, all this time. Nathan was the real one, the one they all wanted, and the one they'd meant to bring back and keep and love as their own.

Nathan _was_ their own.

That left him -- to be the clone.

The half-life.

Sick horror washed over him at the thought. He wasn't anything to them, wasn't anything anyway....

And Illyana had vanished without a word of elaboration, to look for the real one.

Illyana. His train of thought returned to her with a jerk that jolted his body out of its frozen state. 

She was distraught, almost hysterical, and going off to seek out Cable with no real preparation -- and with alarming words about owing him her death. He had to find her. 

And besides, she had just torn his world out from under his feet; she owed him an explanation.

He mumbled something to the rest of the room and practically fled to Cerebro. Between real worry, even fear for Illyana, and the misery and anger toward her for what he saw as the loss of his identity, Stryfe -- not even Christopher anymore, he reflected bitterly -- was well-nigh frantic to find her by the time he settled the helmet and initialized the psi-computer.

Nothing registered at first on his search for Illyana's power signature. What it should be, anyway; he had to rake through old files to locate the record. Not that it took him long. Impatient, he pushed, sending enough energy through the circuits to fry the brain of almost any other telepath, boosting his detection range out past the orbit of the moon.

Still nothing.

And then a signal -- out in space, far enough he wouldn't have caught it with the normal settings. Moving. Part of an orbit, he calculated swiftly. 

Not on the moon, either. 

"Zero!" The android, who had joined him among the X-Men not long after they'd made landfall on Earth and never left, came to his side. "This signal." Stryfe's finger stabbed at the display. "Track the coordinates. Take me there _now_." He didn't even stop for his armor. That was probably a foolish omission, but it was too late now....

**********

Illyana, still in full armor with drawn sword, stepped through her disc onto Graymalkin. Cable swung around and promptly shot at her. 

He was, of course, conditioned to expect Stryfe -- probably attacking -- when a glowing circle of light emitted a figure in shiny silver armor. It was ordinarily an accurate assumption.

He shot to kill.

Fortunately, since Stryfe was much taller than the eleven-year-old girl, the shot intended to blow Stryfe's head off missed Illyana by well over a foot.

To the astonishment of both Cable and Domino -- the latter dashed in as she heard the commotion, being naturally curious as to why Nathan was firing a large gun at the wall -- Illyana proceeded to drop to her knees, chiming softly on the floor, directly in front of Cable.

She extended the Soulsword, hilt first, and turned anguished deep-blue eyes up to him. The words came out in something of a rush, but still a little stilted. "When you were a baby, demons under my authority tricked your mother Madelyne and nearly brought her to sacrifice you, to make Earth forever open to Limbo. There were other children taken; you're the only one who lives and hence I owe you; it was my doing your blood was nearly taken, and it is your right to take mine. Vengeance is yours if you choose."

Understandably confused, Cable had lowered the gun. Illyana, terrified but determined, laid the blade of the Soulsword against her own neck and put the hilt into his left hand.

**********


	4. 4/10

**Unexpected Companions  
by Persephone  
Chapter 4/10**

Stryfe and Zero arrived on the scene just in time to hear Illyana's final words and see her put the Soulsword in Cable's hands and offer to let him kill her.

A strange and different metal began a campaign up over Cable's arm as soon as his hand closed around the sword. The techno-organic virus fought back, inimical metals clashing in silence. 

Nathan looked down at the sword as a bizarre, icy, tingling pain began climbing his metal arm, and yelled both at the agonizing sensation and at the sight of the armor.

Stryfe, in the same instant, cried out against Illyana's offer to die. Not that he was terribly articulate about it, but that was the idea.

Cable, thoroughly disturbed at this point both by Stryfe's arrival and by the armor that was unnervingly and with great determination waging war against the techno-organic virus for possession of his arm (with no apparent concern from either party as to the fact that it was HIS arm), finally forced his fingers to uncurl, and the Soulsword clattered to the floor. Its intangibility didn't seem to extend to flooring.

Then he whirled again, raising his gun as Stryfe took a step forward and stopped. "You."

"Yes," Stryfe spat, contriving to make the monosyllable nasty. "If you --" he added tightly, then looked to Illyana.

She picked up the Soulsword again and stood slowly, eyes darting from one to another of the four other people in the room. 

"If I -- what?" Cable mocked. Domino shifted her weight and moved her own gun to cover Zero, who stood in perfect serenity while Stryfe and Cable glowered at each other.

Stryfe thought quickly. He had Cable's attention, which meant it _wasn't_ on Illyana. Which meant, in turn, that Cable was not likely to attack the girl. It was possible that he didn't plan to, but given what he'd heard and seen, Stryfe was not prepared to risk it. 

And while he might be... somewhat distracted, he really shouldn't have any trouble baiting Cable. With their history, it didn't tend to require terribly intensive concentration. One reckless move from Nathan, incapacitation so the man couldn't decide to take the vengeance Illyana was offering.... 

It occurred to him that the whole idea of his making calculations to protect an innocent child from Cable really ought to be hysterically funny in other circumstances. Then again, in other circumstances it wouldn't be at issue.

With growing exasperation at the entire train of thought, Stryfe derailed it and tried for something more productive, like thinking of a provoking comment.

"What's wrong, Nathan? I thought shooting the messenger was a practice normally employed in the case of _bad_ news."

The first thought that penetrated through Nathan's natural and rather territorial interest in killing the old and _very_ personal enemy who had just appeared on his space station ran along the lines of _What is he TALKING about?_ Curiosity failed, however, to override the threat perception. Stryfe talked nonsense fairly regularly; it was probably some sort of smokescreen. 

As the man was almost certainly ready to deflect a shot, even if for some reason he didn't appear to be wearing armor (No, he could NOT have lent it to the blonde girl. It would never have fit.), Cable growled out, "Have I gotten GOOD news lately about something?" and tackled him instead.

Stryfe lashed back, telekinetically, and threw Nathan off him, shielding at the same time against a shot from another direction as Domino jerked her gun to him from Zero and fired as soon as he'd thrown Cable clear. 

Illyana shrieked at them to quit, first in Russian and then in English. Neither one paid her any attention; Cable didn't quite hear her, while Stryfe merely wondered irritably what she expected him to do _instead_. 

Stryfe prepared mentally to try to slice through Cable's shields, moving forward with the intent of providing his own distraction.

Cable lunged to meet him, firming up his shields.

And pools of light rose up from the floor and swallowed them both, depositing their feet on some other landscape before their eyes found the dim light of what had to be Limbo. Something, or somethings, grabbed them roughly from behind and held them tight, arms pinned and -- somehow -- powers blocked.

Domino and Zero were nowhere to be seen. Illyana stood a few yards away, face white and lips set. 

"Both of you. Stop it. Now. Please." Her voice was strained. Cable's head jerked up, eyes slightly wild.

"If you think you _owe_ me so much, let me kill him! Or... you do it." 

"Christopher... that's one of very few things you could have asked of me that I would refuse." She lowered her eyes. "I've killed too many of my friends already."

"Don't let that slow you down." Stryfe glared across at Cable. "I don't have friends, do I? It's not allowed."

Illyana looked up sharply, sapphire eyes shadowed. "Well. I thought we were friends. Though," she admitted hollowly, "you might do well to avoid me, after... this morning's developments."

Stryfe watched her tensely. "Why avoid you? Because you told me my existence was pointless? Nathan here does that all the time; I still talk to him far more often than he'd like."

"Where does pointless come into things? I said you weren't one of the kids I was responsible for getting kidnapped by demons!"

"Which made me _his_ clone." Stryfe laughed humorlessly. "I should thank you for that?"

"I wasn't expecting thanks, no. For what? NOT nearly getting you killed? Not exactly something that requires a lot of gratitude." She stared blindly at the Soulsword's blade. "What do you mean, made you his clone? I had nothing to do with that. Does it matter?"

"It matters to ME." Stryfe tugged angrily against the restraints.

She glanced toward Cable, eyes troubled. Cable glared at her and growled, "You claim to _owe_ me for some previous mess with demons. But you won't kill him. You won't let me. And you have demons hold me here, _again_? This, after you try to get me to free you from your guilt. _Live_ with it instead. Coward."

Illyana froze, and bowed her head. "I offered you my blood to spill because it was yours by right of revenge according to any number of sorcerous traditions. I don't know for certain it would have killed me..." she hesitated, and her voice held a hint of a wail. "Do you really think I _want_ to die? I _don't_." She took a deep breath, not seeing Cable's accusing stare falter. "I will live, and work out the debt as I see fit. But I will not kill for you one who has been kind to me."

She turned back toward Stryfe. "Why does that matter to you? You are who you are."

"Shut up, you self-absorbed waste of protein," Stryfe snarled at his brother. "You found something you can't blame on me so you're taking it out on her. If you kill her...." He glared and strained forwards again. "Then there'll be nothing to protect you from me, will there?"

Cable glared back. "I wasn't the one who offered blame, she was. I said I'm _not_ going to kill her just to let her get out of living with something she thinks she has to atone for!"

Illyana blinked at Stryfe, ignored Cable, and repeated herself. "You are who you are. Please stop insulting your brother and answer me? He's more likely to have some measure of control over Limbo than you are anyway."

Stryfe looked away. "You don't HAVE to atone for anything; it's a choice you make. And playing the martyr isn't a particularly useful way to go about it."

She sighed and walked over to him. A demon grabbed Stryfe's head and turned his face toward her; she glared at it until it let go. "He had the right. I may have stained most of my soul, but I can still choose right on some occasions. For that matter, I'll probably be more use to him alive."

Cable elbowed the demon holding him sharply in what passed for its ribs, and shook his head incredulously. "Use! I don't want you to be useful; I want you to leave me alone -- and not do any MORE damage than whatever it is you've already done -- and stop expecting me to give you some kind of absolution! I'm hardly _qualified_ to give absolution even if I wanted to." He twisted and got his left arm free for about four seconds before it was pinned firmly behind his back again. "And let me OUT of this," he growled.

Illyana looked at him over her shoulder. "Fine." She raised her eyes slightly. "Let him go." The command was obeyed. Cable staggered forward a step before running into some invisible barrier. "I'm going to send you home," Magik said quietly, "to get reacquainted with everyone. You can leave when you want, of course, but I'm warning you: I've got friends, old teammates, in X-Force who MISS you. If you don't at LEAST stop in on them and say hello and leave some sort of forwarding address, I'll track you down again and again and bring you back as many times as I have to until you do."

A stepping disc swallowed him as she turned back toward Stryfe. "Now." She flicked silver-clad fingers at the demons who held him, and they retreated sullenly. "Without the interruptions...." She trailed off, looked frustrated as he continued to scowl, then lowered her eyes. "What is it you're telling me I've done to you? I don't understand."

"You don't... understand." His voice rose. "You don't UNDERSTAND? No, of course you don't." The words dripped venom. "You've always been the special one everybody pets and adores, haven't you? Haven't you?" He gave a contemptuous snort. "So of course you don't _understand_."

Her eyes darted up to meet his for a moment, sea and sky, then fell again. "Yes." Her voice was almost inaudible. "I suppose, pretty much, I always have been."

She had always been the special one. The youngest, the little girl, the darling -- and in between, though hardly "adored," she had been perhaps the most sought-after creature in that little corner of Limbo.

Given her state of mind at the moment, this was enough to keep her from arguing the point. Still, she folded her arms as if cold, somehow not letting go of the sword _or_ slicing herself with it. "Sometimes," she added, just as softly, "being 'special' isn't all it's cracked up to be."

Stryfe glared at her. "I know that. I know that from times and places that make this pathetic attempt at hell look like paradise. here are nasty ways and nice ways, Illyana. And thanks to you, I don't have any nice ways left." Nor, he added silently to himself, the heart for most of the nasty ones -- but he would have to find it again, wouldn't he?

Illyana's head snapped up and she gazed at him in bewildered hurt before shutters seemed to go up behind her eyes. "Well, this IS one of the nicer parts of Limbo," she muttered. "You're not making any _sense_. You can do what you want, can't you? I'm not planning to _keep_ you here."

"Do WHAT, exactly? I'm not even ME anymore! HE is, and I'm just some second-rate copy that was never supposed to exist! No matter what happens to you, you'll always know who you are."

She looked at him for a minute, then paced around him in a slow circle before facing him again. So that was it. Now that she thought about it, she cringed a little inside, thinking how much of a shock her hasty, half-coherent explanation must have been.

"You _are_ you," she insisted again, forcefully. "And -" she shouldn't do this; she should just send him home. It wasn't as if she had any business acting as if she had the right to --"I don't think you're second rate." She looked away. "Not that my opinion's worth much now, I guess...."

It was Stryfe's turn to look incredulous. "Oh, of _course_ you don't. This would be why you sent Cable back to them in my place? I notice I'm being quite effectively kept out of the way."

"I kept you here to talk to you. Of course I sent him there; they're his family too."

"Too?" he asked bitterly. "_Too_? They're his, period. I'm the _clone_, remember? The copy? I was just there by mistake, because they thought I was HIM."

Magik's eyes flashed with the first real sign of anger she'd shown since bringing them all here. "You still belong there as much as he does. He didn't HAVE to disappear like that, you know. What _difference_ does it make for that, that you're his clone instead of the other way around? So you missed the near-sacrifice and the technovirus. Consider yourself lucky. You missed getting born on the kitchen floor and being held and cuddled and having your diapers changed by eventual members of X-Force --"

"Right. I wasn't born at all, and never got held and cuddled by ANYONE. Lucky me."

She stopped, mouth still open, then closed it and just looked at him for a few moments. "That's sad." She glanced sideways and watched a circle of silver sparks spring up around them, then thrust the Soulsword back into her body. The armor melted away and she took the two steps to reach him and put both arms around his waist, which for her was still just below shoulder-high. Her mind was screaming at her not to do this, not to risk it. 

Demon sorceresses did not hug. They were not affectionate. It was too dangerous for both parties. Her evil would put him in danger, or if he had a bit more sense he'd push her away... but her heart said this was her friend still, and she had hurt him even if she didn't mean to -- _see, isn't that what you always do to everyone, to everything you care for?_ accused her memories of Limbo -- and he'd held her this morning when she needed it. And she needed it again --_no you don't, don't you dare think that, mustn't_-- now, too.

Her heart told her mind to shut up.

Stryfe froze for several seconds, muscles clenched, forgetting to breathe. Illyana entertained for an instant the panicked thought that she'd somehow done him harm, before he drew a careful, very slightly shaky breath. They stood there a moment longer before he slowly brought a hand up and put a straggling lock of golden hair back in place, then tentatively placed the arm around her shoulders.

Illyana relaxed, through her worries desperately relieved that he hadn't chosen to shove her away on account of her reclaimed sorcery, and tightened her arms around him, almost convulsively, as she buried her face in his ribs. Stryfe closed his eyes and wrapped his other arm around her too.

She wasn't pulling away, he realized. It occurred to him that Illyana really would have been utterly appalled at the very idea that she might have baited him in this fashion only to thrust him away in scorn. She meant it. She must. But... that had been when she thought he was the real Nathan Christopher, hadn't it? 

Still, she had made no move away from him yet, and... from what she had said, it seemed as if... as if it truly didn't matter to her.

Did he dare believe that?

Could he bear to disbelieve it?

Ever so slowly, Stryfe began to relax into the child's embrace. He almost flinched when she freed her hand, but it was only to pat him gently on the back. 

Something small and light collided firmly with his nose and then clung to it. Stryfe snorted involuntarily and jerked backwards, knocking whatever it was away telekinetically and reflexively rubbing at his nose with one hand. 

Illyana stirred -- actually, she stumbled forward rather ungracefully when Stryfe jumped, then got her balance back and peered up at his affronted grimace and the small, gaudily colored insect he held in a tiny golden bubble, just far enough from his face to be able to focus on it. 

"What is _this_ thing?" The thing gave an abortive buzz. 

"I don't know. Let me see it," she replied sensibly. Stryfe hoisted her up one-handed, and she leaned her forearm on top of his shoulder while she peered at the creature. It was shaped like a housefly, mostly, but it was mauve -- with orange stripes -- and had 13 wings, the smallest a withered-looking little fragment of tissue in the exact center of its back. It was also partly crushed. She searched her memories. "I think it's a minor demon, actually."

He looked startled. Illyana winced slightly at his expression --_way to go, remind him of that_ -- then glanced back at the insect, then at Stryfe again. He also looked a little skeptical. "_This_ is a minor demon? It looks like a bug."

Her lips twitched. "_Very_ minor. As innocuous as they come; it wasn't even enough to trip my wards." 

Stryfe actually laughed, if a bit shakily, as he set her down. Feeling somehow that neither of them was really ready to let go yet, she leaned against his side and gazed up, studying his face. He looked... a little less stricken, at least. She felt another pang of guilt for being so abrupt with him that morning. And he'd still....

"Did you, ah, want it for anything?" 

Illyana frowned for a moment, then shook her head. The bubble winked out and the creature emitted a rather dismal, whining buzz as it arced to the ground and bounced. She followed its struggling crawl into the shadows with her eyes, but made no move to help or hinder. 

"Thank you," she said finally. 

He looked down at her in genuine surprise. "For what?"

Illyana flipped long hair over her shoulder and stared at the dark, smooth, barren ground. Then she raised her head and met his eyes. "Well, among other things... thank you for coming to look for me, and --" she hesitated, and looked back down -- "and hugging me when I needed it." She didn't dare keep on "needing" hugs, though....

"Why _wouldn't_ I come to look for you?"

She blinked hard, several times, without taking her eyes off the too-sleek dust at her feet. She was not going to cry. Really. No matter how warm it made her feel that he sounded as if she should have taken that for granted, and no matter how much it hurt to think of having to hide from him. She opened her mouth to say something, not sure what, but he continued before she had the chance.

"Of course I would." He laughed self-mockingly. "You've made yourself a part of everything between me and Nathan now, whether you meant to or not, and there you'll stay. No matter where you go, there we are. You might want to cut all ties, little one, run off and hide by yourself... but I guess 'Cable' just proved that it doesn't happen, didn't he?" He gazed off into the warped landscape. "And I'm going to hold you to it. You'll never get rid of me. I might hate what you've done to me, but you're still..."

Illyana, still pressed against Stryfe's side where she'd slid down from looking at the minuscule intruder, stiffened. Cut all ties... how had he _known_? She had thought she had shields, based on the sorcery she'd taken up, or had thrust on her, depending on how you looked at it. Then again, he was an extremely strong telepath, someone she was accustomed to trusting, and she... was somewhat emotionally ruffled, not to mention the interesting issues involved in evaluating her current level of expertise.

She didn't want to get rid of him, her heart cried out. She didn't _want_ to cut ties. But she was so afraid of what might happen if she went back. Of the unease in their eyes, or worse, trust and later -- perhaps -- betrayal. "Still what?" 

"You're still the only one who trusts me. Now more than ever, probably."

Illyana finally looked up again, at that. "I don't see why...."

"I'm not even someone they're supposed to care about anymore. I lied to them all this time, even though I didn't know it was a lie.... Their attention will be on Ca-- Nathan now, where it should be." "Should" had more than a little resigned sarcasm about it.

"They're 'supposed' to care about both of you!" she exclaimed, for the moment forgetting her own worries. "You're still their son. And if you think they won't pay attention to you now, explain to me how you reconcile that with all the time I seem to remember being spent trying to track down Cable... Christopher, Nathan, whatever."

"That's different. And don't try to tell me it isn't, because it IS. _We're_ different. And I don't even know if I want their attention, let alone the dirty looks and the _pity_...."

She let go of him and folded her arms, leaning back slightly. "I never said you weren't different, but it sounds like you think just because they had it mixed up as to which of you was which, they'll stop caring about you because you're Cable's clone. When they thought he was yours, they still looked for him. So that doesn't hold water." Illyana shook her head. "And don't try to tell _me_ you don't want to go home."

"If I have to go back, you're coming with me."

She dug a toe into the ground, not looking at him. "Who said I wasn't?" she hedged.

"You just did. I've known you since before you could read, Illyana." He'd watched her that long, at least. "Your lips might lie to me or try to distract me, but the rest of you can't. I've been where you are, and I can tell exactly what you're thinking. Without the telepathy, although I could do that too."

She closed her eyes. "I want to go back. Believe me. But I shouldn't." She had to force the words out through a throat that was much too dry, and was almost glad she'd pulled away from him so he at least couldn't _feel_ her trembling.

"Why?"

"Because."

That wouldn't do at all. He was her friend. He deserved more of an explanation than "because."

He was her friend, and she had to find some way to give him up and keep him from trying to look for her again, so that she wouldn't yield to tempation and jeopardize him as well as the rest of the only world she really _wanted_ to live in -- and hence didn't dare.

But to push him away, she would have to hurt him. But if she didn't, she might do worse.... He was still waiting. She compromised.

"Think about it, _Christopher_." So she'd called Cable that, a moment ago. She'd been calling Stryfe that for much longer, and the only first name she'd heard that Cable had given for himself was Nathan. She summoned a faintly derisive smile and hardened her eldritch shields. "I'm hardly prime company myself, right now. You say I trust you. But do you really think you can trust me?"

Stryfe winced slightly and almost took a step back. Calling him Christopher, _now_ of all times, was almost a slap in the face -- and the girl had almost appeared to put on a new personality like a garment. He realized, with a slight chill, that after a fashion he had just seen Illyana give way to Magik. 

Next he realized that she had done it on purpose, and the indignation of that knowledge was what let him catch himself before that backwards step.

Stryfe considered carefully. He wasn't about to tell her of the cold clenching in his gut at the thought of going back to the X-Mansion, back to Scott and Jean and everyone else and _Cable_, without even the one person there who had trusted him unquestioningly all along, however naive it had been of her.

Not to mention the utterly _lovely_ prospect of having Piotr ask him where his little sister was.

"Are you telling me I can't trust you?" He was hardly in the habit of trusting people, even now, but some time ago he had discovered that he no longer felt like trying to get away when Illyana climbed on him or hugged him, and stranger still, he had found himself talking to her almost unguardedly.

Illyana turned away, and Stryfe couldn't help wondering why he'd felt such a loss ever since she pulled back from that first, terribly unexpected and almost impossibly reassuring hug. "That's just the problem. I have no intention of betraying you in any way I can possibly avoid... but... you'd be a fool to trust me."

"And you were a fool to trust me. Any trust is a risk, Illyana."

"Then why take the risk? I can send you back easily enough, no worries there." She turned to face him again, head tilted and lips ever so slightly quirked. "I do have the control I learned; there's no particular danger of my accidentally landing you in the wrong time, at least."

Stryfe shook his head. "That would be the least of my worries, I assure you." He fought off a shiver and finally realized that the chill he felt was not merely emotional -- the air was very cool here, and a light, frigid breeze wandered the bleak landscape.

"Really."

"Illyana," he began again, wondering at the absurdity of himself -- of all people -- arguing for trust. "If you're worried about whether we _should_ trust you, does that not at the very least mean we can trust your intentions?"

She spoke very softly and very hollowly, with a wry humor as bleak as the horizon. "Surely you know what they say about good intentions."

He glanced around. "Aren't we already there? Perfectly safe, then."

Illyana's mood refused to be lightened. "Unless I leave, right?" She sighed and looked up at him again.

Yesterday, her eyes would in all likelihood have been happy. Laughing. Not haunted. Yesterday she would never have even considered the thought of leaving her home with Piotr and the X-Men, and planning not to return. 

Yesterday she would have flopped down beside him with a book, and melted his heart yet again after it started collecting flakes of ice from the uneasiness so few could keep from their gazes as they regarded him.

Yesterday he had thought he was Nathan Christopher Charles Summers, not some clone, and yesterday Illyana had not remembered Limbo.

The silence stretched until Illyana finally shook her head and huffed in exasperation. "That's why, you know. You asked why I shouldn't go home? Because if I do, I put everyone I care about in danger. Because if I do, you'll have a demon sorceress in your midst. Do you know what kind of peril _comes_ from that? It's a taint at the very least." 

She took a shuddering breath. "Because if I return, I will want to stay. And the longer I stay, the more I neglect Limbo and the more readily I can lose control of it. Few of the New Mutants _did_ trust me completely, and as it turns out, they were right not to. I prefer Earth and its universe to Limbo, and therefore I have to live here, not where I would like to. I do not want a repeat of what happened when Sym and N'astirh got the chance to conspire against me. Surely you don't either." 

Her words and voice remained precise, but a low shudder in the ground betrayed her emotion as the wards spat sparks in a rough circle.

"I knew, you realize," Stryfe said in response to the silent, defiant challenge that followed her words. "I'd watched you for some years well before we ever met in person. I even gave thought to whether as you grew up again you would remain the X-Men's... Siberian Snowflake, or become a sorceress again."

"Then you knew the risks --"

"I've taken worse ones, for less worth."

Illyana tried to ignore the implied compliment and stalked past him to pace the perimeter of the warded area. "If you know, if you saw, that's only more reason to agree I should stay away." She whirled on him. "Why do _you_ want me to go back? After 'what I've done to you.'"

"I've _told_ you, haven't I? It's worth the risks. You are. And -- do you really think I want to go back there alone, when Cable's there and they'll all be making a fuss over _him_, welcoming _him_ home, and let them all assume I've been deceiving them on purpose the entire time? Hardly any of them trust me anyway, and about as few actually like me. Yes, I know, big surprise." His shoulders slumped. "And now it turns out I'm not even their real son. Just a clone, and a mistake at that. Not real."

"Of course you're real," Illyana said softly, turning to face him again. Worth the risk? Maybe it was, if Stryfe stood in that much need of a friend. "'People are always real. Everyone. Always.'" He raised his eyes to hers, mouth barely open in surprise or question at having his own words of what seemed so long ago repeated to him. She hugged him again, nestling her head against his stomach.

"What makes you think clones are people?" he asked hoarsely, arms still at his sides. "Or even _can_ be 'real.'"

"You are. Madelyne was. That's what. 'Once you are Real you can't become unreal again. It lasts for always.' And even if you hadn't been to start with, I'd have loved you into it by now." It had been so easy for her to love.

Illyana heard Stryfe's ragged intake of breath. She could feel how rigidly tense he was, and that he was starting to tremble. And a slight... tapping, almost... she let the gleaming mental shields dissolve. "You mean it..." he whispered, and finally put his arms back around her. 

She felt something land on her hair and looked up to see that his eyes were tightly closed, that his lower lip was caught firmly between his teeth, and that there was a single following tear crawling down its sparkling path along the side of his nose. 

"Of course I mean it." She closed her own eyes.

"You'll come back?"

"...Yes." She would. "I can't promise I won't leave again, but I'll come back. If I can, I'll always come back."

There was a certain relief to saying so, even accompanied by the dread that she'd bound her friends to her own taint. Perhaps, after all, it was better. Her arms tightened unconsciously as she considered how easy it could be to lose herself in Limbo, to the Darkchilde part of herself, if she could never go to her _real_ home. If this were really all she had.

Her throat felt constricted, her eyes hot -- and dry. They burned, even closed.

Illyana wished for tears she could shed.

**********

Nathan looked up from the shimmering white film and loops of wire, his own eyes feeling a little too warm. He suspected he had failed to blink for a while, which didn't make too much sense considering he wasn't certain the images depended on normal vision at all. He found Stryfe sitting up cross-legged and watching him, Illyana's head pillowed on his thigh. 

"So," he said in a low, rough voice. "Are you glad you didn't kill her after all?" He watched Stryfe's expression change, grow first -- could that be hurt? -- and then become guarded, with a sort of vindictive satisfaction.

All that, all those visions of Stryfe and Illyana together and so _friendly_ with each other -- he really hadn't thought Stryfe capable of being that sentimental, not that it seemed that normal for the sorceress either, though the child Illyana had been sweet enough the few times he'd visited her -- clashed starkly with the thought of how she'd died in his timeline.

Stryfe straightened slightly, a hand going toward the hair that spilled over Illyana's shoulder in what looked like an abortive soothing gesture. "Yes," he said carefully. That was all.

"I bet. Sweet kid. Does she know how close you came to killing her? Slowly and painfully? Or is that something you haven't told her, maybe haven't told anybody?" He stopped and swallowed, thinking back to the frail, angelic little creature coughing her life out in an instrument-surrounded bed, intensifying his shields to hide the shudder and the guilt he'd felt over not stopping that before it could happen to her.

Then it occurred to him that there was no reason to hide it, not really, and deliberately, without batting an eye, he projected it across to Stryfe.

Image. Feeling. All of it, in brutal honesty.

He felt it sink through shields that were far softer than they should have been, and felt the mental quiver that went along with Stryfe's visible wince. "Stab your eyes, I told you my shields were --" And that, he noted wryly, was before the memory itself registered. When it did, the angry voice broke off on the instant.

"Like what you see?" he asked ironically. "That's what happened in my timeline. That's what you did to her; that's what you did to thousands of the mutates in Genosha before her."

"I didn't." It was almost a whisper. And Bright Lady, he'd seen that look in the mirror a thousand times. It never made him any less relentless with himself either. 

"No, _you_ didn't. Not in your timeline. But you planned it, didn't you? I saw the dismantling. You may have changed your mind, but you had planned it. Every. Last. Bit." All the anger from his own timeline, at Stryfe for causing the epidemic and at himself for allowing it, at all the pain he'd seen in its victims, at the anguish in their loved ones, at Moira's and Hank's driven exhaustion, distilled itself into his voice.

Stryfe looked hunted. "I did plan it. I didn't release it! None of that _happened_ in our timeline; you can't blame me for yours!" 

"Can't I?" Nathan replied levelly. "Oh, it obviously makes a difference -- to you and everybody else -- that you never did release it. But you did everything else. You _meant_ to cause it." _The why of any situation is secondary to the situation itself. What is, is. What he meant to do is secondary to what he did do. IF I QUOTE ANY MORE ASKANI PHILOSOPHY AT MYSELF I WILL SCREAM. I. DON'T. CARE!_

"I know. Stab your eyes, do you think I don't? _I chose differently from your Stryfe._ I didn't kill her -- them. If you saw that much, didn't you see _anything_ to make you realize I -- care about them now? Does it not make any difference to _you_ that I didn't do it?" 

"Why should it? It didn't help my version," Nathan pointed out grimly. "But how would you like Illyana to know you came one step from consigning her to waste away like that? Or see how her alternate died?"

Stryfe actually paled, before fighting a visible battle for control of himself -- and control of his shields, the strangely softened golden wall Cable had pierced, so much more easily than he would have expected. He tried to keep a foot in the door, a tendril of thought penetrating Stryfe's mind, but it didn't work. It just barely didn't work. 

"I wouldn't," Stryfe managed finally, with a reasonable semblance of calm, "as you well know. And no, before you comment, I don't really expect that to make any difference to you. What might, though, as you're so concerned over her alternate, could be thinking of the effect on her...."

Cable glared at him. Stab his eyes -- he found the right buttons to push too, too easily. "Shameless, aren't you?"

Stryfe smiled thinly. "Under the circumstances... not precisely, but I'm choosing to ignore it."

Illyana chose that moment to stir, and Nathan choked back the bile at realizing he was doing as Stryfe wanted, and didn't tell her. Even knowing all he did about what the man across from him had done, could have done, had almost done, he didn't tell her, because he knew he'd hurt her worse that way than this Stryfe was ever going to do.

Then he slept. He wasn't sure whether he trusted the two... or if it simply didn't matter anymore.

**********


	5. 5/10

**Unexpected Companions  
by Persephone  
Chapter 5/10**

In what passed for morning, they moved on. Nathan found himself awakened by Illyana crouching just out of arm's reach and whispering at him -- an odd method, to be sure, but apparently she wasn't certain of his mood or reflexes immediately on awakening. This was, most likely, wise.

He didn't know whether Stryfe had slept or not. The man seemed moody, but not significantly more or less so than the previous day. 

A shiftline swept over them, making Nathan shiver despite the oppressive, humid heat on the other side. He raised his head sharply, fighting the sudden weight of air that, despite its comparative clarity, felt far heavier with moisture than the fog they'd just left behind. There were more coming, moving in clusters; all the laws of probability said that with that many together there would be a deadly zone in the mix, and Murphy lent his considerable mass to the equation.

His eyes narrowed and his steps slowed as he concentrated on the approaching shifts. Those approaching, and those --

Forming!

"Stop!" he barked, grabbing at the two just ahead of him and halting Illyana in her tracks -- and jerking Stryfe backwards as a shiftline ripped open where he'd been stepping. 

Stryfe stared at him. "I didn't even sense that," he began, eyes a little bit wide. He stopped as Cable shook his head urgently.

"No time to discuss it. There are more coming, as if there weren't enough around already -- it's like a breeding ground; we need to get out --"

They were out. A thin line of silver passed across his vision and drew a completely different universe around him, and he couldn't feel the shifts anymore at all.

"Well, that was disorienting," he muttered. "Limbo?"

"Yes." Illyana was standing poised, as if expecting something to jump at them, but her shields were low and he could sense no real anxiety from her. "If this wasn't what you meant by 'out,' tell me now."

"Not exactly what I had in mind, but it works...."

Stryfe, Nathan became aware, was _still_ staring at him, as if the change of venue hadn't even constituted an interruption. Then again, since they were the same height, maybe it hadn't. "Thank you." Nathan turned around at that and returned the stare for a moment.

_Manners, Nathan,_ Redd's voice said calmly in his head, and he jumped and actually looked around, drawing a rather mystified element into Stryfe's gaze, before mumbling slightly over the words "You're welcome."

Illyana saved them from further awkward conversation by asking for directions to a relatively shift-free area, which proved difficult to locate since they first had to find a way for Nathan to sense the shifts from Limbo. He hid his reluctance to do so -- Limbo wasn't precisely pleasant, but the absence of the grimy transitions was rather a relief.

Silver-white plates finally deposited them in the middle of a vibrant green meadow, with what looked like a fruit tree a convenient few meters away and pink flowers dotting the grass. It looked idyllic.

Nathan was utterly certain it was not.

"Well," Illyana observed, looking around in some surprise, "this seems nicer than I was expecting."

"Seems," Nathan murmured. "Good choice of words." It should be safe enough to walk. He kicked at the grass, which patted his foot a little reproachfully, and went over to the tree, where he stopped and stared up at it.

"Waiting for anything specific?" Stryfe's voice inquired from a few steps back. 

"Me? No, just watching the leaves grow," Nathan replied airily, still studying the tree. Stryfe made a slightly impatient noise. Nathan could see why. The fruit looked delicious. Inviting, bright ruby-red, almost like jewels set among the leaves and bowing the slender branches with the weight of their sweet juices. He felt his stomach growl. The tree could almost have been designed to act as a lure.

He shrugged and, still warily, reached up and closed the fingers of his left hand around a fruit.

There was a drawn-out, vicious hiss and he drew back quickly, shielding and dropping the fruit to bounce on the soft grass, as something wriggly shot down the length of his arm to end with a loud clang and a faint snap. He noticed something small and sharp-looking arc away and fall while he snatched the little wriggling creature away from the side of his neck and held it out to look at.

He found himself looking at a devastatingly beautiful little serpent with glittering emerald-green scales, a swollen triangle of a head, and a jaggedly broken ivory fang. That had been too close, too, and he'd been expecting a booby trap. Just not quite such a fast snake.

It hissed again, angrily, and he tightened his grip on the writhings of the rest of its body and removed his thumb from the head. It promptly struck at him again, lightning-fast, and snapped its other fang off short on his metal thumb. Another hiss of pain and it tried a third time, flinging a drop of blood into the air from the tip of the shorter broken tooth. 

"Well," he said to it. "Aren't you cute."

Stryfe emitted a rather choked noise from behind him, and then added, in the mildly strangled tones of one who suspects the person to whom he is speaking has abruptly mislaid his wits, "Cute?"

"Well, it is," Nathan replied, fighting a grin without turning around. "Absolutely adorable. Great at ambushes, too, except it missed the lesson about not biting victims with metal skin. Unless you have metal teeth, of course." 

"Nathan, it is a venomous snake," Stryfe pointed out, obviously putting some effort into sounding composed instead of irritated. 

"_Really_? I'd never have guessed. What tipped you off, the venom running out of the fangs it snapped off when it tried to bite me?" He'd managed to get his thumb past the thing, and while it tried to gnaw at what should have been the nice soft web at the base, he massaged the venom sacs until they spent themselves. The runnels actually seemed to be starting to corrode his hand by the end, but he wasn't too worried. 

"Nathan...." His clone was beginning to sound exasperated. 

Cable turned. "Yes? Here, catch." He made as if to toss the snake Stryfe's way and almost laughed aloud at the other man's expression and the quick preparation for a telekinetic block.

"NATHAN!" Illyana snapped at him. 

He managed to look a little sheepish even as the grin tugged his mouth wider. "All right, all right. I was just kidding." He looked back at the snake. "I wonder if I should put it back or keep it? Not like it's in much shape for hunting anymore." 

Stryfe warily lowered the shield he'd raised and gave Nathan an incredulous look. "What, you're thinking of keeping it as a _pet_?"

Nathan hadn't really been planning on it, but it was starting to seem like a better idea, at least for teasing purposes. "Why not? It's adorable, and it can't eat much...." He was going to persuade himself in a minute if he didn't watch it. Besides, he _had_ damaged it already. Of course, it had been trying to kill him, but still.

Having run entirely out of venom and mostly out of energy by this point, the snake's frantic assaults on his hand had dwindled to sporadic squirming. Nathan thought the head massage might have had a relaxing effect, too. It was a pretty little thing, and would probably die if he just let it go.... 

Besides that, judging from the look he was currently getting, keeping it would drive Stryfe crazy. Crazier. Whatever.

"Yes, I think I'll be keeping it." Oh, definitely crazier. He watched Stryfe get control of his features with considerable effort. And grinned.

Illyana looked from one to the other of them and shook her head. "I'd say I was in a way glad we aren't all our right ages, because if we were I'd have probably had to babysit the pair of you, except for one little problem. I didn't get out of it after all!"

"Oh, don't worry about it...." He held up the snake and peered into the lidless eyes for a moment, feeling about telepathically for the tiny mind and lulling it into recognition and calm. Not to mention reinforcing the lately-conditioned impression that biting him would HURT, though he didn't have much faith in the efficacy of the latter part, as it hadn't seemed to have any influence at all so far. "Perfectly safe and docile now."

The serpent hissed a little weakly and thrashed as if to belie his words, but when he dropped it serenely into a pocket it simply slithered down to the bottom and lay there. It did nothing more than wiggle occasionally until he took it out and fed it a small glob of what Illyana claimed was liver jelly when they made camp for the night. The fangs looked as if they were coming loose; he began to wonder if they'd grow back in.

It didn't try to bite him again, and apparently went to sleep while he lost the battle with curiosity and again accepted the scryer he hadn't noticed Illyana take back the previous night. 

**********

As neither Stryfe nor Illyana had actually been present (they had, in fact, still been alternately arguing and being mushy in Limbo, which apparently found such proceedings a little unusual), Nathan found it slightly difficult to persuade the scryer to focus on his own alternate's return to the mansion in much detail. 

It cooperated eventually, however, and revealed a scene of general pandemonium and welcome, eventually broken into by the arrival of the X-Men in X-Force's vicinity, whereupon confusion dominated, especially once Piotr ascertained that his sister was missing. Concerned, he eventually resorted to taking on his armored form in order to get close enough to Cable to inquire after her without being squashed. 

Domino apparently had established some reasonably friendly relationship with Zero, as the two arrived in company. This generated still more confusion, as Stryfe's (or Christopher's) mode of transportation had returned without him. It was a situation somewhat akin to an empty saddle, though as Domino pointed out -- loudly -- there was no reason to assume the teleporter who had yanked Stryfe off to who knew where -- "Limbo," Cable inserted -- couldn't bring him back, too. 

Illyana solved that particular problem fairly handily by emerging from a stepping disc, in a well-selected area of bare floor. It was perhaps fortunate that she was still holding the Soulsword and hence armored, though probably if she hadn't been Piotr would have stopped to think and de-armored himself before scooping her up into a hug. As it was, the embrace clanged. 

The clamor finally died down long enough to let both Cable and Stryfe answer the numerous inquiries as to where they had _been_ all this time, which was perhaps a more apt question for Cable, as he'd been gone for significantly longer. For the most part, Cable opted to be evasive, but got the distinct impression he was going to have a lot of trouble if he tried to avoid continued contact. He was also, he suspected, going to have a lot more trouble if he attacked Stryfe, as the man had actually offered to leave and been threatened with being sat on if he tried. Not that this would probably be terribly effective, but it was probably a figure of speech anyway. 

"All right, if you're Christopher, what are we supposed to call Chris, uh, Stryfe?" 

"I'm Na--" Cable began, but was overridden. 

"I mean I suppose we could call him Chris, too, but it would get confusing." 

"How about Stryfe?" Stryfe suggested, a bit dispiritedly. 

"I guess that could work." 

The babble continued. Stryfe and Cable spent much of the next few days growling at each other, but refrained from actual assaults as long as someone watched them like a hawk the entire time. Mostly. There was one occasion when Stryfe incautiously, or perhaps maliciously, made reference to the wars of the thirty-eighth century in answer to someone's attempt at making conversation. 

Cable tackled him into a large schefflera. "How DARE you, you --" Nobody except Stryfe and possibly a few other telepaths followed the rest of what he said, and they steadfastly refused to translate for anyone else. 

"Both of you, cut it out!" Illyana snapped from the nearest doorway. "Do I have to send you both to Limbo again?" 

Cable glared at her but didn't try again when Stryfe cautiously removed him to the other side of the room and righted the plant, seething inwardly. "I seem to keep ending up there by your machinations, don't I?" he growled. Illyana went white. 

Stryfe turned and took one step forward before Jean stalked in from the hall behind the young sorceress, who moved into the room and towards Stryfe to get out of the way, and possibly to help keep him in line. 

"That was uncalled for," Jean said firmly. "I won't argue over the grudges from your... shared history, though I do expect a certain standard of behavior." She ignored the involuntary snorts. "But you have no business talking to Illyana like that: I don't know what impression she gave you of what went on when you were almost sacrificed, but it was hardly all her fault! Some of her... um... servants staged a rebellion and dragged Madelyne into it; Illyana opened a portal, true, but she was tricked too. She had nothing to do with wanting you killed; that was supposed to take control _away_ from her, as far as I could tell." 

Illyana made a faint noise, as if to protest some or all of what Jean had said, but didn't get any further. Cable folded his arms and transferred the bulk of his attention from Stryfe to her. "That's very interesting and not very close to what you said." He frowned at the medallion around her neck and jerked his head. "What is that thing?" 

Illyana looked down and lifted it cautiously. "This?"

"Yes." 

"It's -- a sorcerous tool." She obviously didn't want to be talking about it, and bit her lip before flipping it open and going on. "Each stone is a bloodstone. They stand for evil in me -- not really fractions of my soul, which I thought at one point, but... acts... I've performed, that -- that stained it badly, that were in a certain... category, or level, of evil." 

She swallowed. "At least by the definitions in Limbo black magic. Some systems, the rankings vary, but that's the rulebook for here." 

"A tool for what?" 

Illyana went very white. Stryfe looked daggers at Cable from behind her. "Belasco said filling all the spaces was to make me into a gateway so the Elder Ones, whom he serves, could leave their prison dimension and come through Limbo to Earth," she said wretchedly. 

A muscle in Cable's jaw twitched as he stared down at her. "Let me see?" He meant it as a request. It might as well have been a command. 

Clearly reluctant, unwilling yet with the air of being unable to refuse, Illyana dragged the chain over her head with motions as ponderous as if it held a millstone instead of a small bejeweled medallion, and dropped the pendant into Cable's large palm. 

He frowned, transferring it to his left hand on instinct at the strange, not entirely physical prickling he felt from it. 

Cable looked back up from the necklace, chain dangling from his fingers as the pendant nestled in his palm. "I still don't completely understand what went on," he admitted, meeting Jean's eyes and ignoring Stryfe with difficulty, "but stab my eyes if I know why she spilled that nonsense about letting me kill her! What you've said doesn't make it sound one BIT like her version; what did she think she was doing?!" 

Stryfe started forward a step. "She is a child and she was hysterical at the time! What did you think YOU were doing?!" he demanded. 

Cable turned to glare at him, a bit defensively, wondering in some layer of his mind when Stryfe had developed this bizarre protective streak. "Minding my own BUSINESS until she showed up!" Almost absent-mindedly, he fingered the pendant, turning it in his hand and thumbing irritably at the bloodstones in turn with his metallic nail. 

And the bloodstones crumbled and fell away in sticky russet crumbs like picked scabs. 

He looked down at his hand in surprise as Illyana gave a low, choked cry. A little puzzled, he rubbed out the remaining residue from the sockets, turned his hand over and let the crumbs fall, and then held the pendant somewhat uncertainly toward the girl. 

Illyana stared up at him, sea-blue eyes wide in shock, then snatched at the medallion with trembling hands and sank to the ground weeping, and laughing through her tears. "You did that," she choked out between sobs, "cleansed -- you said you wouldn't absolve me, but you did, you did." 

Watching through the peculiar scrying device, Nathan Summers shook his head. His alternate obviously had NO real idea what he'd just done or how, despite Magik's admittedly bewildering explanation. Not that he himself was completely sure what the "Dark Ones" were, but then, he didn't know of anyone besides, perhaps, Illyana or Belasco or Dr. Strange who _did_ know. 

In the image, Cable frowned uneasily at the child at his feet as she continued. "You don't know, do you? You just wiped out... all the progress of that spell. All of it. And put me that much farther from being lost for all, and the world from the Elder Ones' return." She looked up, eyes bright and wet, and leaned back against Stryfe's shins as he approached, looking... about as confused as Cable, actually. 

Attention drawn back to Stryfe, Cable felt hate surge again, but knew better than to start. 

********** 

The task of separating the two fell to Illyana less often than might have been supposed, as she was occupied being exclaimed over by her friends from when she was a New Mutant and being quizzed on whether she really remembered everything until she wanted to cry, no matter how kind the intentions. 

They weren't always precisely kind. She made them nervous, now, as she had as Magik before, and since Stryfe had never fully _stopped_ making people nervous, there was a good deal of low-level anxiety all around. 

Magneto's next move was unfortunate, to say the least. Nathan compared the scenes in the scryer to his own timelines and didn't recognize the beginning at all, but when word came from Israel that David Haller had vanished and from Shi'ar space that chronospatial disaster was looming, he realized it didn't necessarily take either a space station or a mindwipe to send the boy over the edge. 

Old grudges were put on hold -- even to the extent of persuading Magneto to join them in Israel for the repair effort, and even to the extent of Cable and Stryfe _very_ grudgingly agreeing to work together. 

"The fate of the world -- the entire _timeline_ -- is at stake, and you two are fighting each other again?" 

"Yes!" 

"Well, DESIST!" Thunder cracked overhead as Ororo began to lose her patience with the two. "You are brothers. You might consider _acting_ the part." 

"We _are_," Cable protested quickly. "Cain and Abel." 

The ambient temperature dropped several degrees. "That is hardly acceptable." 

They looked at each other and each thought about the world at large and the family they'd both come to love, and came to a tacit agreement to cooperate. For now. If they had to. Which they did. 

Curiously, as failure seemed imminent and -- true to form -- various pairs who either were couples or wished to be met what they believed was the end of their existence with a kiss to be caught in crystal, Stryfe looked around at the scattered embraces and swept Storm into one of his own. 

A scene flickered at the side, whether the true incident or only something Stryfe had remembering at the time, where he watched from the ground -- no, only a tiny rock jutting from the sea somewhere -- while Ororo rode the fury of a hurricane and for once abandoned herself to it, laughing. He barely shielded from the lash of wind and water, and startled her badly when he finally rose into the air himself, drenched and windblown. She hadn't known anyone was there; she hadn't meant -- but he met her apologies with a grin and congratulations on her mastery of chaos. 

She didn't fight the kiss. 

********** 

Nathan looked up from the scryer briefly. "You kissed _Storm_?" 

Stryfe stared back for a moment. "What is that thing showing you anyway?" He was interrupted by a muffled giggle from Illyana. "Yes, I did. Why not?" 

Nathan hesitated and then shook his head. "It just seems... odd." He didn't want to go into why it seemed so odd; the attraction they'd held for a while in his own timeline only made it stranger. "... Were the two of you together when --?" 

Stryfe shook his head. "We dated for a while, but not. She and Mikhail eyed one another for a time as well." He sighed and looked away. "Perhaps it could have been more. Then again... just as well, most likely." 

The words reminded Nathan of what had probably happened to that Storm, to all Storms, the burden, the nightmares, the guilt... the horrible deaths he'd seen give release to some. He shuddered and didn't answer, letting his mind be caught by shimmers into another past. 

**********

The temporary end of the world managed to reconcile Cable and Stryfe, however uneasily, to the idea of not killing each other on sight. It did little, however, to alleviate the strain of daily conversation between the two.

"Good morning, Na-- I mean Chri--" Stryfe broke off in exasperation and glared at Cable as they tried without success to pass one another civilly in the hall. "Forget it! I am not calling you Christopher. Get over it."

Cable gaped at him for a moment before his response emerged in a muted roar. "GOOD! I've been trying to get everyone here to STOP calling me Christopher. My name is NATHAN. I have been called Nathan all my life and the next person who calls me Christopher is going through the WALL." He paused and glowered. "And if it had been YOU, it would have been SEVERAL walls. And a lawnmower."

Stryfe, who had naturally enough _been_ being called Christopher right up until Illyana's passing revelation, not to mention having called Cable Nathan for several decades, and who was for these and other reasons having a very hard time adjusting to the new arrangement, tried to process this. 

"You don't want to be called Christopher?" he managed, a bit faintly. 

"NO. I do NOT. And the worst part is apparently YOU are the only one in the entire HOUSE who is cooperating!" 

"I assure you I'm not doing it on purpose," Stryfe muttered, and they finally succeeded in departing the hall.

After that morning's outburst of corridor-bellowing, the occupants of Xavier's mansion began reverting to the more customary appellations, identifying Cable as Nathan and Stryfe as Christopher. They all felt kind of weird about it, but it did cut down a lot on the stammering whenever someone tried to address one of the two. It also cut down on the amount of unexplained glaring Cable did, which was a relief.

**********

Nathan looked up from the scrying film and directed a moody gaze at the flickering campfire before transferring it to Stryfe. "So should I be calling you Christopher?" 

Stryfe, or possibly Christopher, looked nonplussed. As well he might, Cable realized with some chagrin, given that the question had been based on a conversation that had occurred some time ago. "Ah... it doesn't particularly matter; I answer to either one."

"Illyana called you Stryfe."

"Sometimes she does."

"Usually when he's in trouble," Illyana inserted, grinning. 

"It's still my codename, actually...."

None of them noticed the approaching, nigh-silent footsteps until the looming shadow parted from the fog to rumble, "Greetings, fellow wanderers. May I share your fire?" 

The words and tone were civil enough, but that voice! It haunted the second-worst parts of his nightmares, the ones that came a close second to the parts where Apocalypse spoke through Scott's mouth. 

Cable snatched at his psimitar and stared up in horror at the towering figure of Apocalypse before launching himself forward, crying out incoherently in Askani and sweeping the psimitar blade around to attack. Out of the corner of his eye he glimpsed Stryfe lunging forward as well.

A streak of mist wrapped into his eyes, and Apocalypse dodged. Somehow. He simply wasn't _there_ anymore to be hit by the attack, he was... over to the right. Cable pivoted, blood roaring in his ears and almost drowning out Illyana's furious shriek. "Sit DOWN! If he were hostile my wards would have alerted us; will you two show some _sense_ -- augh! You IDIOTS!" 

In his peripheral vision, he saw her as she yanked at the air with one hand, then cast a small dark ball sharply groundwards.

Cable had poised for just an instant, mind flying through calculations for his next move, one that should cut off Apocalypse's escape route. He sprang forward... and the next thing he knew, something seemed to explode softly yet concussively inside his skull, and he found himself flat on his face, half stunned, with his ears ringing and vision refusing to focus.

He tried to push himself up off the ground, but couldn't. As his hearing cleared, he heard a low grunt off to his side somewhere. Stryfe down as well? Fear shot through him. What had Apocalypse done, and where was Illyana? 

Her voice floated to his ears, cool and formal but rather exasperated. "Sorry about that. They both have, well, issues with a number of other yous. I had wards set to warn of a hostile approach, and do not have the personal reasons that seem to keep them from hearing courtesy when it is in your voice."

"Quite all right." Apocalypse's booming voice was punctuated here by a heavy sigh. "Lately I seem to be running into a remarkable number of otherwise respectable individuals who want to tear me to shreds."

Cable heard a rude noise from Stryfe, and agreed fervently as he continued to imitate a landed fish. 

"It's really quite distressing."

Illyana gave a rueful laugh and agreed, a bit faintly. "I would imagine. They do have reason to expect you to be an enemy, I admit -- not just these two, probably quite a lot of other people. To be honest, I'm a little surprised to find you so agreeable."

"I could be disagreeable if you prefer," Apocalypse rumbled blandly.

"No, please don't," she replied hastily. "That tends to cause problems."

Cable wondered whether to award the sorceress a trophy for Understatement of the Cross-Time Sludge or just for Stating the Blindingly Obvious. Or maybe he should just hit her over the head with both of them. Only he still hadn't managed to organize his limbs into anything resembling a cooperative effort, and his head still felt as if it had a small pillow stuffed into it, which was both what he was upset about in the first place and the obstacle to doing anything about it.

"Very well," Apocalypse replied amiably. Cable couldn't help feeling that there was something seriously wrong with that adverb, but the External really did sound... amiable. It was disturbing. 

Illyana gave a rueful laugh and continued the conversation, beginning to attempt an explanation and send out feelers regarding why this Apocalypse _wasn't_ attacking -- which he still wasn't. Cable quit listening. He still couldn't believe the foolish girl had felled him and Stryfe both -- they were supposed to be her _allies_, weren't they? Her friends? At least, she claimed Stryfe as a friend and Cable as someone she "owed" -- and she had _attacked both of them_ in the midst of a battle with their worst enemy!

Frustrated, and with his initial suspicions of the sorceress companion to Stryfe reawakened, he charged at _her_ when he struggled to his feet, instead of at Apocalypse.

Illyana looked towards him, eyes going wide, but did not draw the Soulsword; he would be able to --

And Stryfe lunged to his own feet and tackled Cable out of nowhere. Nathan found himself grappling with his clone, who projected fury and snarled into his face. "How dare you -- won't let you hurt her --"

"She attacked both of US on Apocalypse's behalf --!"

#I didn't like it either, but --# "She must have had a reason!"

Cable suspected Stryfe had not intended to project that first part. And then _that_ voice rumbled in his ears again. "Would you care for me to separate them?"

"If you would."

As the import of those words registered, and before he had time to counter it, Nathan found himself and Stryfe grasped firmly and dragged apart by the back of the neck and shoulder by two huge hands, as if they were no more than squabbling puppies. 

"Do you two _mind_?" Illyana asked, voice dripping irritation. 

Cable glared at her, any hope of being reasonable lost in frustrated adrenaline and humiliation. "Yes, I do mind. I mind very much having HIM welcomed the way you did. I thought you considered me and Stryfe allies of one sort or another, and yet you attack _us_ to protect _Apocalypse_?"

"Did it not occur to you, when he asked _politely_ to be our guest, that it might be possible for some alternate version, even of En Sabah Nur, to be other than an enemy?"

"No!"

"Well, let it occur to you now," she snapped sullenly. Nathan folded his arms and was aware that he probably looked equally sullen. Stryfe looked from Illyana, to Nathan, to the impassive Nur, and Cable astonished himself by feeling a glimmer of sympathy for his clone, caught between a friend who'd just attacked him and two men who _ought_ to be enemies but were not currently acting hostile.

"Perhaps," Apocalypse intervened, "I would do better to pass onward, rather than remaining as a source of discord." Illyana and Stryfe protested, Stryfe half-heartedly, while Cable grumbled that it was too late for that. Nur insisted. 

Hence they learned little of each other's timelines at this juncture, though Illyana thought it behooved her to give some explanation of what pursuits Apocalypse was known for in the preponderance of timelines with which she or Nathan or Stryfe had familiarity, and of his role in the collapse. This Nur looked grave, and expressed regrets and a desire to help which Cable didn't believe at all, as well as registering an objection to being called "Apocalypse," and then departed through the translucent curtain of a shift that led to blazing sun over something that glittered white like snow but was coarse like sand, and blue cacti. 

The three remaining watched the zone suspiciously until it drifted off away from them. This kept them from looking suspiciously at one another; Stryfe didn't seem to want to take Illyana to task for the assault with Cable present, but had been as humiliated as Cable -- and had considerably more reason to feel betrayed. Nathan was mildly disgusted with him for accepting Illyana's silent almost-apology before what passed for morning, and his own resentment -- and Illyana's, as she still appeared to consider herself in the right -- kept a chill over the party that couldn't be accounted for by the clamminess of the mists.

Still, though, they had to rest, and hardly breaking the discontented silence Cable stood -- or rather sat -- guard, and afterwards slept until the nightmares woke him. He froze instead of rising, mind racing to sort out what ought to be reality from the dream, and hence heard soft voices.

"You need more sleep. I'll keep watch now. It's not necessary; my wards should warn me early of anything they can't stop, but --"

"And if they don't?" Stryfe asked, his whisper much harsher.

"Then," she admitted, "we'd be in trouble. We could well get into trouble waking, too, though." A short silence, and then, "I told you I'd stay awake. You have to sleep sometime."

"I did."

"Not long."

"That's hard to tell here."

"It was very hard to wake you. That means it wasn't long enough."

It could have been something in the atmosphere, actually, Cable noted. She was leaving out that possibility for the sake of the argument. He didn't really think that was the case, though; Stryfe hadn't been all that extravagantly difficult to awaken.

On the other hand, when being completely honest with himself, Nathan had to admit that he was personally accustomed to sleep deprivation, which probably affected his perceptions of how long it was normal to take when waking up.

"I wasn't that slow to awaken, was I?" Stryfe returned, sounding somewhere between defensive and concerned. 

"It depends on what you compare it to. It didn't take as long as usual, but it also took Nathan leaning over you."

Threat perception? An adrenaline rush could tend to speed things up too. He hadn't really thought of that, for some reason. It would probably have been more fun if he had.

"That didn't have _anything_ to do with it."

"Oh? In that case I should probably be even more worried about you. Reflexes going, or something."

"Stop that."

"What? I'm not doing anything."

"Worrying about me."

"Somebody has to."

"No they don't." 

"Do too. Go to sleep."

"No they don't. Not unless you mean as an opponent. Illyana --"

"Chris, please just go to sleep before the conversation degenerates to the 'Do not/Do too' level."

There was a faint noise Nathan suspected of indicating Stryfe had given in, at least to the point of lying down, and a smile in the next whisper. "You started it."

"Go to sleep!" 

Nathan lay quietly in the ensuing silence until he judged sufficient time had passed to prevent suspicions that he'd been eavesdropping, and then sat up and reached for the scryer. Illyana frowned at him.

"You go back to sleep too," she said softly.

"Too?" he asked, feigning innocence. Actually, he feigned confusion, which was much easier, especially since he was still drowsy enough he would have liked to go back to sleep if it weren't for the dreams. 

Illyana gestured towards Stryfe, who hadn't stirred. "You should both be asleep."

"I woke up, can't get back to sleep now."

"Did you try?"

"Not really."

"That might explain it," she pointed out dryly. She shifted a bit, armor making a faint musical sound against itself. Nathan caught himself thinking she'd make an excellent cricket. Either he was really sleep deprived, or he was losing it.

"I don't want to go back to sleep," he admitted. "The dreams...."

Illyana looked at him for a long moment. "Is it better or worse when you're too tired to wake up and get away from them?" Then she turned her head again and stared into the distance. She didn't seem to expect an answer.

"I'm curious." Nathan picked up the scryer and sank into it, wondering briefly whether his fascination was really curiosity, or escapism, or a bizarre form of self-flagellation, watching a timeline he'd ruined.

**********


	6. 6/10

**Unexpected Companions  
by Persephone  
Chapter 6/10**

The first thing he saw was a wedding. A joyous occasion, though it made him uneasy to realize that depending on when Nate Grey hit the timeline, if he did, Scott's first wife was probably actually alive again. But they couldn't have known that. Even Illyana seemed oblivious.

Cable and Stryfe -- or Nathan and Christopher -- both attended the wedding, assaulting one another during neither the ceremony nor the reception. This is not to say the situation lacked tension. It was strongly suspected that neither had wanted to risk the other being there and himself not.

Stryfe was either nosier or less abashed about being so than Cable had been in his own timeline. He was less than delighted about finding out that Jean and Scott had apparently been deserted by their own psyches at the start of their honeymoon. Cable privately and a bit reluctantly found this understandable, and watched as a sort of uneasy competition escalated matters until his alternate wound up hovering over the unconscious pair, across from Stryfe, as the two men exchanged suspicious and rather defiant looks. 

Apparently this was too much for the newlyweds when they did wake, for instead of trying to conceal the knowledge that they'd been the ones to raise Nathan, they practically tackled the two "boys" with tearful explanations. Their sons, naturally, were first confused and then astonished. 

"Nate --"

"Nathan. Not Nate."

"Nate," Jean persisted, "we were -- we _were_ the Daysprings, Slym and Redd, I know you said you didn't remember, but we were."

"I know."

All three of the others stopped and stared at him. "You what?"

"I know." Nathan fidgeted slightly. "I didn't know this was when, but I figured it out a little while back.... It clicked, when Warren mentioned your nicknames."

Stryfe glared briefly.

Scott looked at them both for a moment, very seriously. "We didn't want to leave. Either one of you. If we could have stayed...."

Nathan looked down and muttered quietly, "I know. I -- I didn't really think you did."

"What," Stryfe asked, very, very carefully, "are you all talking about?"

"You don't remember?"

"Apparently not."

"We got pulled forward in time to raise Nathan --" Jean began.

"That part I got."

"If you keep interrupting how are we supposed to tell you?" Scott inquired, not unsympathetically.

"Show me?"

They did. Stryfe flinched, shown that he'd been left behind or taken by Apocalypse before they could get him free -- it was too confused to tell -- but at the last, finally, he believed that they'd had no way to look for him without a terribly high likelihood of getting themselves and Nathan all killed. He was almost glad, though, that Rachel had vanished entirely into the timestream a week ago so that he couldn't ask her about it. Which made no sense, as for her it hadn't yet happened, so she could hardly have told him anything.

The end, where the Dayspring Unit had interfered with Apocalypse's last attempt at taking a host, left him almost dumbfounded. "That was you," he said softly. "I can't believe --" He stopped, as if realizing something only just then, and stared at Nathan. "That was _you_?"

"Apparently," Nathan replied, a bit cautiously. "What was?"

"You blocked _him_ out of my mind."

"I did?" Nathan thought about it for a moment, trying to make the memories settle into place. "I did. You _really_ appreciated it, obviously."

"I didn't remember," Stryfe said, very quietly. 

He knew better than to try to apologize. 

**********

Nate Grey, being the flamboyant sort he was, came to the attention of the X-Men and various associates, not to mention enemies, fairly quickly. Cable and Stryfe both, in a futile attempt to avoid confusion, insisted on calling him "kid." This annoyed Nate severely and didn't really seem to clarify anything.

Holocaust was located shortly thereafter. Actually, Holocaust did an excellent meteorite imitation shortly thereafter, having failed to end up on Avalon for the exceedingly natural reason that Avalon, in that timeline, was still Greymalkin, and Cable was less inclined than the Acolytes to fish belligerent frozen psychopaths out of space.

This was probably wise of Cable, given that fishing Holocaust out of the vacuum and thawing him had an alarming tendency to result in Avalon falling apart and crashing out of space, not necessarily in that order.

Upon regaining consciousness, Holocaust embarked on a long tirade which boiled down to "I am the son and heir of Apocalypse and you will all die for your impertinence in restraining me," only much louder.

Stryfe muttered that the post wasn't all it was cracked up to be, knocked the man out mid-rant (much to the relief of everyone's ears, as they had neglected to soundproof the room in which they had confined him at Nate's insistence), and proceeded to mystify those who could still hear by remarking thoughtfully that he'd _wondered_ what Holocaust was up to and this explained a great deal. Perhaps it did to him, but no one else was much enlightened.

Madelyne, needless to say, was even more of a surprise. Life was complicated. Then again, that was nothing out of the ordinary.

**********

"Nathan?" Illyana's voice and hand on his shoulder brought him alert in the morning, or what passed for morning. 

"Something the matter?"

"No, we just have this probably nonsensical habit of going somewhere as long as we find ourselves in the middle of nowhere."

"Couldn't you just stay in Limbo? As far as I remember there's some kind of structure there."

Illyana winced. "We could, but it's not an option I really want to explore. You got your snake?"

Stryfe groaned elaborately from off to the side. "Just what I always want to hear first thing in the morning. An inquiry as to whether one member of the party has his snake with him."

Nathan produced his snake and examined its mouth. The teeth were healing nicely. "What I can't quite figure out, Stryfe, is why you find it so alarming. It's just a snake. A little one, too."

Stryfe sighed. "You'll excuse me if I have my doubts about anything that thinks _you_ are edible."

"I'd think you'd be pleased with it."

"I've had traveling companions eaten before."

Probably here, too. Nathan cringed internally and thumbed his snake again.

Stryfe gave him an odd look, then shrugged and stared at the horizon, such as it was. "For the record," he commented, "I meant before I started time traveling."

He couldn't be trying to be comforting. Could he? How annoying should that be, anyway? Nathan shook his head and gave up on answering when he abruptly felt ice-cold all over and a shiftline rippled in the air not twenty feet away, billows of snow just visible on the other side. Then it rushed them.

He didn't have time to fight it, or propose running, or do anything other than call a telepathic heads-up as a shift he suddenly knew didn't have snow at all bore down on them. He only hoped he'd be able to carve a path elsewhere -- powdery dry ice was not his idea of a pleasant environment in which to spend his last moments of life.

What he'd done or how, Nathan was never quite sure. He'd held onto the other two, somehow, but he hadn't been touching them. Still, he must have held to them, because after the eternity he spent wrestling with a choking silver curtain in more dimensions than he could reasonably count, and thrusting away from the deadly "snow," and other equally fatal universes, he found himself standing with both of them in what looked for all the world like a restaurant.

He would probably not have consciously appreciated it if the jukebox had been playing something other than "Time Won't Let Me," but since it was, he thought he would have. At any rate he distinctly and actively did not appreciate its choice.

When it finished and changed to "Do You Believe in Magic," the three all exchanged unnerved looks and, since they seemed to be in the way of people who wanted to dance, found a free table, and told the waiter who appeared literally out of nowhere that they needed a few minutes. The irony did not escape them. (Not that they were in a position to talk about appearing from nowhere, either, though they suspected, or at least hoped, that the waiter was a teleporter and had done this on purpose rather than being thrown into the situation as they had been. In the latter case, however, it would have been significantly less probable that he should arrive fully equipped with menus and aplomb.)

Cable spent some time searching anxiously for any effects the shiftline might have had other than their own arrival, but no one appeared to be dead or dismembered, though if anyone had vanished he wouldn't have been able to tell anyway. The most he found was an arcing line of powder on the floor near their point of arrival, a line that was vanishing before his eyes even as cold white vapor rose from it. Only carbon dioxide. 

Only. It would have seemed much less innocuous had it surrounded them.

Someone giggled and squealed. "Cooooool! It's like a fog machine!" Could anyone really be that giddy?

He brushed past the dancers again and returned to the table, unexpectedly relieved to see that both the people he'd left there were still sitting at it. He still had his doubts about Stryfe, of course, but there... there was something to be said for not traveling all alone.

Stryfe, come to think of that, might have said it. Nathan winced internally at echoing a sentiment of Stryfe's, but consoled himself with the thought that this one seemed to have changed a lot. He found his clone staring intently at something that appeared to be halfway across the room and was visible only because fewer people moved around between the tables than on the dance floor. 

"What are you looking at?"

"That blade." Stryfe was frowning slightly. Cable turned, followed his gaze as best he could, and caught sight of a short sword leaning against the leg of a table. A short sword with a very... interesting hilt. Familiar.

"Didn't you try to steal it once? Not planning to try again, are you?" he asked, with only a touch of malice, and slid into his seat. There was probably reason to stare.

Stryfe didn't appear to be offended. "One like it. I suppose I did get one _like_ it, at that. What did you do with the real one?"

"The real what?" Illyana asked, sounding rather as if the conversation had taken a sudden leap over her head, and she was annoyed at it.

"Sword." Cable waved vaguely and unobtrusively in its general direction. "Hid it for a while, then gave it back, with a warning not to display it any time soon. What did you want it for?"

"To kill Apocalypse."

Oh. Nathan blinked. Stryfe had been going to use _that_ on Apocalypse? "A plain sword?" He couldn't help sounding a little skeptical.

"That wasn't all I planned to use. It was supposed," Stryfe replied a bit grouchily, "to be symbolic." He studied his hands for a moment, then looked up and made a very decent recovery when the waiter popped into existence beside them again to ask if they were ready to order. "Ah... milk, please."

"Milk?"

"Milk." Stryfe was very firm about this, as the waiter seemed, for some reason, not to believe him. 

"It's..." The waiter fidgeted slightly and looked unhappy. "The latest milk's started to turn, I'm afraid. You won't want it."

"That's fine. If you prefer, you can boil it first, if it's smelled off for more than a day or so."

Nathan tried not to smile at the waiter's obvious discomfiture. He couldn't even remember when his digestive tract hadn't been inured to slightly sour milk -- though he had to assume he'd been at least a year or two old, since it wasn't considered nearly as important in this century. Lactose intolerance had apparently been mostly bred out of humanity somehow by his time, no matter where you went on the globe. Funny. Somehow he couldn't quite see that as having been Apocalypse's doing, at least not on purpose. Too... trivial. They wound up with cinnamon-sprinkled boiled custard and falafel as well. Illyana, presumably because she found it amusing when the two old soldiers she was with had opted for sour milk, asked for vodka. No one challenged her.

He remembered suddenly that there had been something more than a little odd about Illyana after she regained her knowledge of Limbo, as seen in the scryer. She'd looked older -- not just from the burden, either. She'd appeared to age a little more rapidly at first, though not too obviously, as she went back and forth between Earth and Limbo. When she had started to look -- after a few months -- old enough to belong in X-Force, the process had slowed again.. or perhaps stopped entirely, leaving her indefinitely in that charmed and sometimes aggravating gray area where she could seem a childlike teenager at one moment and a world-weary but still lovely queen the next.

Sometimes her sapphire eyes had still laughed.

All right, enough of that. He was getting as sentimental as... as.... He didn't want to finish that sentence. "Symbolic of what?" he inquired, poking at his meal with a fork. "That a weapon made in his honor... in his image... could kill him?"

"Something like that, I suppose." Stryfe looked up at him, then glanced back to his own plate. "I may have gotten the _effect_ I was after, at least... well, in part."

"But you didn't HAVE it." 

"I used the fake." There was a short silence. "Well, what else was I supposed to do? He didn't know the difference. Unless he checked with someone after he teleported off with it stuck through his chest, he didn't know...." Stryfe trailed off and sighed. "I suppose," he said softly, "I achieved a fairly appropriate symbolism I wasn't looking for at all."

Illyana reached over and squeezed his hand under the table, and there was a longer silence before Cable said quietly, "The original blade was broken when I found it."

Stryfe gave him a long, thoughtful, and slightly surprised look before he turned away. 

After enough surreptitious study of the rest of the room to determine that they were, overall, unlikely to notice someone gazing raptly into a small wire contraption and less likely to take advantage of the situation if they did, and the observation that neither Illyana nor Stryfe seemed inclined to quibble with his staying largely out of their conversation, Nathan was seriously thinking about watching a little more of their timeline when he felt a twinge at the edge of his mind. He spent an uneasy moment trying to identify it. Succeeding didn't make him feel much better.

He stood up, a little abruptly, and signaled the waiter. They'd already agreed on doing a little moving of assorted objects for the proprietor in lieu of trading anything they were carrying -- well, that and some extremely bizarre goblet Illyana offered the waiter as a tip. It was a lurid magenta and filled itself, for no readily apparent reason, with powdered graphite if you let it. Illyana had pointed out that she was sure the waiter had to have more use for the stuff than she had for a mountain of it in limbo. They hadn't actually _seen_ the proprietor but had been assured that, in accordance with logic, that individual would just as soon have the materials for a new wall moved into position (not built; apparently it had to be _just so_) as be presented with _more_ materials that would probably be useless in a restaurant. Unless they were carrying a wooden spoon of high quality, or a kitchen knife they'd be willing to part with? No, hadn't thought so. They'd spent an interesting half hour speculating in low tones -- louder would have been impolite -- on just how the restaurant kept itself supplied with food.

Stryfe frowned up at him. Illyana's expression didn't change, but she asked softly, "Something the matter?" 

"We have to go." He didn't bother trying to sound calm, but he did keep his voice down to a level nobody away from the table was likely to catch. "There are shifts on their way."

Stryfe glanced towards the approaching waiter and switched to telepathy. #And?#

#There are several, converging. It's not... natural.# As if anything of this was natural! #They're all aimed at me.# 

Illyana was included; he could feel her at the edge of Stryfe's mind, and she raised an eyebrow at that statement. So did Stryfe. The two looked strange, in concert that way. #I think my presence attracts them, at least when I'm in one place so long. I shouldn't have spent this much time here --# 

#Don't start THAT again.# His clone's thought was dry and a little irritated, and Nathan found himself slightly miffed. He broke away as soon as Stryfe turned towards the waiter; he didn't like being in mental contact with the man. 

Apparently he had communicated some sense of the urgency, though, he thought with wry amusement. Silver discs swallowed the rocks and deposited them again in neat order so rapidly that neither he nor Stryfe had time to do a thing. Powers could of course activate quick as thought, for all three of them, but Illyana had darted ahead through openings in the crowd that wouldn't have admitted either of the two men without shoving.

They left without teleporting, however; Nathan was hoping to draw the shifts away, as they would probably just continue on course if he simply vanished. Not that they seemed to have done too much to the restaurant so far.... He stopped to look over his shoulder as they stepped outside, and froze. He must have made some noise in his throat, because he sensed Stryfe and Illyana both stop and turn less than two steps beyond him.

The sign over the door read neatly, with a half-sun between the words, "Nur Deli."

"No." He shook his head suddenly, a little violently, and glanced at Stryfe, who had spoken at the same time. Ordinarily he would have been irritated, but didn't think of it just then.

"Can't be." 

"Right." Nathan looked at the sign again. "It can't."

"Not every occurrence of the name --"

"We were leaving." He turned resolutely back around and started walking, then stopped to glance over his shoulder again. It still said the same thing.

Stryfe nodded in slightly too enthusiastic agreement and turned away from the building as well. "Yes. We were."

They kept going and didn't look back again. Cable half expected Illyana to giggle, after a look he caught from her at the start, but she didn't. She did, every so often, smile mysteriously as they walked. Stryfe glared at her on these occasions. Nathan very carefully did not.

**********

It was always annoying, Cable reflected as he pitched into space, when a shiftline coincided with the edge of a cliff. 

Not that he fell far. He started to catch himself almost immediately, though he was still moving slightly when he hit the translucent yellow floor. It was not the base of the cliff, although that also, come to think of it, had appeared both yellow and vaguely translucent in his brief unobstructed glimpse of it. He bent his knees automatically at the impact, though it still jarred his ankles, and straightened slowly before turning slightly to his left to eye Stryfe, who was presumably the source of the obstruction, which was now sedately continuing the descent. Stryfe shrugged. Illyana was peering interestedly over the edge.

It would, Nathan told himself firmly after they had landed gently and without mishap on ground of some cloudy gold-tinted crystal, be... immature... to complain about the elevator service, or even point out that he could have caught himself perfectly well. 

The entire trek from -- he suppressed an urge to shudder -- Nur Deli had been remarkable primarily for its uneventfulness. He had announced that he was going to be going pretty much in circles for a while and judge, from what he could feel when, whether he'd gotten the shiftlines sufficiently distracted from the little cluster of lives he'd accidentally almost lured them to. 

He'd been a little brusque about it, almost defiant. He could recognize this in retrospect and admit that it had been because he had expected them either to shrug and part ways, or to assume he was trying to tell them what to do, and argue or ask who he thought he was. Or perhaps question his sanity; he wasn't sure he'd blame them for that. 

It would hardly be fair, given his own doubts on the matter....

It had taken him by complete surprise when Illyana had looked up into his eyes and nodded solemnly with the comment, "I thought you would. I can get you out if things get too wild," and Stryfe had smiled faintly -- smirked, maybe -- and said nothing... and both had gone along as if there had been no question. 

It was possible that there hadn't, for them, he supposed. Neither one had mentioned any particular goal to their travels except to be moving, unless he counted the mention of playing fairy godmother to assorted of his own alternates. 

Nathan turned back for a moment and stared up the way they'd come, and admitted silently to himself that he hadn't been looking forward to the separation and found the realization very disturbing. For one thing, in a general sense, he couldn't afford to get too attached to anyone under the circumstances. It would ordinarily be only natural, though, and he might have been able to deal better with the fact itself if not for the deeply ruffling addition that one of them was... well... Stryfe. 

He distracted himself by studying the faceted, rippling shimmer of other realities that flickered back and forth along a boundary that moved faintly as if with wind. There wasn't any. It stretched high above the place where uneven stone and straggling plants -- mostly dead -- stopped peeking through; he couldn't see the top, and wondered suddenly whether there _was_ a top. Could someone theoretically make it _over_ a shiftline? (Could the cow jump over the moon? Wait, somewhere in the shifts was probably one who'd managed it. Really, really deep atmosphere or... something....) What would be on the other side then? Did the question even have meaning? He'd never really thought of the possibility before, but surely the shiftlines, the fractures in reality -- he did shudder this time -- didn't radiate out from Earth through the rest of the universe? 

Please, no. Not that. As if one planet weren't bad enough, let him not have destroyed the rest of the universe as well. 

He nearly jumped out of his skin at a light touch to his upper arm, and broke off the reflexive counterattack when his conscious mind caught up abruptly with events and determined that there was no attack to counter in the first place. 

Brought back to himself with something of a jerk, Nathan realized he was standing perilously close to the shift boundary, almost in the area around it where -- depending on the properties of the particular shiftline -- it was easily possible for a sort of instability in the facets of the fracture to cut someone in two (or more), that he had been craning his neck back to search for a top that probably didn't exist and at any rate would have been obscured by the clouds, and that he had been completely ignoring Stryfe and Illyana. That was probably not smart. The latter was still moving when he dragged his gaze far enough down to see her; he guessed she had touched his arm and then dodged hastily out of reach. He was glad he hadn't hit her, anyway.

On top of and resulting from his excursion into the edges of oblivion, his muscles were all knotted with tension and he was trembling, partly from that and partly with cold -- and he had a cramp in his neck. Ow.

On the bright side, he thought morosely as he stepped back into a hypothetically safer area, the clouds were a normal color, or something like one. At least, he thought they were, though the sky was definitely... off. The clouds seemed to range from blinding snowy white in the brightest part of the sky to a stormy charcoal near (appropriately enough) the shiftline. Come to think of it, it only made sense for atmosphere exchange to take place, though he'd been lucky enough so far that really toxic vapors had usually seemed to be confined. Usually.

Lucky. 

He stared into the glowing amethyst sky regardless of his protesting neck muscles, and tried to let the brightest sun he'd seen in days burn away the tears.

It wasn't working. He decided it wasn't going to work in time to do him any good about the time he telepathically overheard Illyana speculating with some concern on whether she was going to have to smack him this time, so he shook his head and blinked a lot and dashed the rest of the tears away from his eyes as best he could with the back of his hand. Squinting probably wasn't going to do him much good, given that Stryfe probably knew exactly how well his eyes adjusted to bright light, but he kept up the pretense for about half a minute anyway and settled in to wait for snide comments. 

Stryfe didn't say anything. Cable wasn't entirely sure whether Illyana had kicked the man in the ankle or not. Nor did he ask.

**********


	7. 7/10

**Unexpected Companions  
by Persephone  
Chapter 7/10**

The next shift landed them all in the hospital.

That would have been funnier if it had only been by injuring them. In the case of serious injury, finding a hospital that could treat them would have been nigh-unbelievable good fortune. Granted, Nathan was perfectly competent in first aid and assumed Stryfe was, and something Stryfe had mentioned hinted that Illyana had some interesting talents in that area, especially in Limbo. Illyana had made deprecating noises and, when she decided Nathan wasn't taking her seriously enough, had stopped dead in front of him and explained very, very intensely that while she'd always do her best, her medical abilities with magic were nothing to count on too heavily. Still, injury would almost have been preferable to what struck them instead, especially if it came with help.

This was not a hospital for injuries. It was a hospital for sickness, and the stench of it struck Cable's nose and mind at the same time. Hygiene was the best, presumably, that could be managed; there was a sharpness in the air that spoke of antiseptics and everything in sight was sparkling clean where it could be. Still, the smell wasn't pleasant. He could identify too many components of it.

The despair was worse. Everyone here expected not only death but imminent disaster on a larger scale than the individual, and those who still scurried back and forth with purpose knew they were fighting a losing battle, and did it anyway. Cable took a bleak moment to wonder how this was different from any other time or place in the shifts, perhaps even from most of the course of history. 

He shook it off. Their purpose was to ease suffering, and they counted it worthwhile. But it was still a dreary place, and he knew the reason; he'd caught the name of the disease they fought.

This place was devoted to Legacy. Perhaps it hadn't always been, but at some point, presumably in its original universe, it had opened itself to such victims -- and who could blame more for flocking there, or other patients for fleeing (or, in the more sedate and official form of fleeing, having themselves transferred) to some other location that wasn't developing a high concentration of mutants who -- contagious or not -- were _expecting_ to lose control of their powers?

Logically enough, that was soon its entire purpose. It was just as logical, if a little strange, that all the doctors, nurses, and other staff were not mutants. 

Humbling. Very much humbling, Nathan thought, for anyone who had ever listened to all the cries of rage and fear and resentment and propaganda long enough and hard enough to start thinking perhaps it was true that all non-mutant humans hated all mutants and the sides must align against each other. He knew better -- but even he had wondered sometimes. It was very easy to. 

It was also very unhealthy to start believing that everyone automatically "feared and hated" you. At least in combination. Believing any given person or group might be out to kill you was prudence, of course, if you put yourself in the kind of situations Nathan did, but it wasn't quite the same. 

His mind was yanked abruptly off this philosophical train of thought as someone came into the narrow stretch of empty hallway in which they had materialized -- he hastily grabbed hold of the shift and _shoved_ -- and was pleasantly surprised when it disappeared and left the building's structure essentially intact. 

"Y-y-y-you?!" He didn't recognize the woman, but it appeared that in her own timeline she'd had enough contact with Xavier's lot to recognize Illyana -- and Stryfe. Enough to distinguish _him_ from Stryfe, and focus on the latter, her mind mingling dawning terror with wild thoughts of hopeless vengeance. 

This didn't surprise Nathan. It caught Stryfe off guard and bewildered, which puzzled Nathan until he remembered that this Stryfe, or Christopher, hadn't released the virus, and in any event lacked Cable's own peculiar and frequently disturbing awareness of every given shift he wandered into. Then, too, if he wasn't actively scanning... well, it wasn't as if they'd seen any of the patients yet. This wasn't one of the halls they'd had to put beds in. Too narrow.

The woman's eyes fixed on Illyana with still more alarm than Stryfe had been incurring. "You have to get out.... If you aren't sick yet, you have to go."

Cable assumed Stryfe was scanning by this point, but flicked a telepathic summary at him anyway. #Legacy. Your 'pox' -- this place is dedicated to its victims. Every last patient.# He found someone's eyes to look through and projected an image of someone in the last stages -- emaciation, purple blisters and boils, rattling breath, and all. No visible effect on the powers, probably not an active one. 

It was at this point that he realized Stryfe had gone pale.

"Illyana," his clone said in a strained voice, "she's right. Get out." 

"What?!" 

"Illyana, _now_. Teleport. Please. I'll -- I'll explain later." 

A stepping disc -- no, two discs -- appeared, one under Illyana and Stryfe and another under Nathan's own feet, a little ways off. 

Stryfe shook his head, stepping back. "I have to stay."

Cable blinked at him. That was a surprise; what was he doing?

The pools of light winked out and Illyana folded her arms. "Then explain first." 

In apparent desperation, Stryfe grabbed her arm and thrust her towards Cable. "Ask him. He can explain." 

"You explain!"

"In my timeline and a lot of others," Cable interjected, deciding this had gone on long enough and that he didn't really need to see Stryfe and Illyana start fighting in a narrow corridor -- even if he wasn't sure what Stryfe was up to, other than getting Illyana away from potential contagion, which he couldn't exactly object to, "Stryfe not only didn't go back from the moon with the X-Men, he released a disease targeting mutants. Very nasty -- like a horrible version of influenza, only with purple lesions and a lot of DNA damage -- loss of control of powers and general disintegration of most systems by the end. Your alternates tend to die in the early stages. I'd suggest you go straight to Limbo and if you have any kind of spells that could work against non-magical diseases, do them."

Illyana looked up at Nathan very hard for a few excessively long seconds, then looked once at Stryfe, nodded to herself, and disappeared into a disc. Good. He looked up again as Stryfe turned towards the now _very_ bewildered doctor, took a deep breath, and began, "I can help. At least I can try -- do you have any sort of laboratory here?" 

She nodded, obviously trying not to shrink away from him, and her gaze shot past Stryfe to Cable, who hesitated, then shrugged and nodded as well. It made no sense, but he didn't _think_ this one was likely to cause anything worse. #Stryfe, what are you doing?# 

#What does it look like I'm doing?# Stryfe snapped back. 

#Going to brew up some more mischief?# Unkind, given the anguish that hinted at lying just beneath Stryfe's words. #Or did you design a cure along with the virus?#

#I didn't design the virus. I modified it. I did design the counteragent. If I can find the supplies....#

Nathan hesitated. He didn't know exactly what supplies would be needed, but he'd be willing to wager a lot that the hospital, clinging to a fragile cohesion with its resources most likely stretched to the utmost and probably a little beyond, did not have them. On the other hand... they probably still existed someplace. #Can you communicate with Illyana if she's in Limbo? And can she scry for specific things? Or I might be able to look.# 

Stryfe didn't stop walking, but did turn and stare at Cable over his shoulder for a moment before turning a corner. #That... would help, thank you. Yes, I can get in touch with her from here.#

Cable spent the next few hours being occasionally teleported back and forth for consultations. Apparently the scrying pool required very specific instructions on occasion, and Stryfe was too preoccupied to evaluate every item it presented for consideration by looking through Illyana's eyes. Cable was somewhat curious about the rate at which the work seemed to be progressing -- he was almost certain some of the procedures should have had to sit for significantly longer.

It turned out that Stryfe was rushing them along telekinetically wherever he could. Of course. No wonder the man was distracted.

Once everything seemed to be assembled, Nathan was essentially turned loose in the hospital to do whatever he could find to do -- as long as he didn't interfere with the doctors or nurses, or upset the patients, naturally. 

He settled down in a quiet corner of the floor, displacing a large aloe plant slightly, and speculated on whether aloe would do anything for the purple boils while with another part of his mind he debated the wisdom of trying to sleep in this place. Probably not a good idea. Well, maybe if he reinforced his shields enough first.

Come to think of it, he hadn't used Illyana's portable timeline-scrying contraption for a while. He suggested something regarding Limbo, and the obliging milky swirls picked up his senses and spun into the middle of....

**********

A battle. This was not how any of them would have wished their next meeting with Tolliver -- Tyler -- to go, and Stryfe knew it even with Cable and Domino both deliberately not speaking to him. 

Actually, if Tolliver had been merely who they all had thought him for so long, none of them would have particularly cared -- well, Stryfe wouldn't; he got the impression that Cable and Domino would both have wanted his head on a plate, and other body parts on separate dishes. Or perhaps disintegrated, as an acceptable alternative.

The revelation that he had been _Tyler_ was what made it difficult. For Stryfe this new information largely made it embarrassing -- he hadn't _realized_ in all those years of dealing with him as Tolliver? For Nathan it was far more emotional. A bit surprising in its intensity, given he'd brought himself to shoot the boy before. Stryfe told himself he did not feel guilty about what he'd done to Tyler -- it had been a war, after all -- but he hadn't been comfortable with his efforts at revenge on Nathan for some time, particularly ever since he'd learned of his template's role in saving him from Apocalypse in at least that one way.

Most likely, however, they could all agree that it would have been preferable had Tyler not somehow leagued himself with a denizen of Limbo -- Illyana suspected Belasco, but whoever it was, he or she had the sense to stay out of the direct action, either that or the inability to get into it -- with plans to reenact and this time complete the sacrifice atop the Empire State Building.

With Stryfe as a secondary victim and the undermining of Illyana's authority a minor side effect, of course.

Yes, this was definitely off the list of ideal or even semi-satisfactory meetings. 

On what could, with an effort of the imagination, be called the bright side, he and Nathan were both dodging around on the roof, powers sapped by some mechanism he'd been completely unable to identify, instead of helpless in the grip of rebel demons, which was where Tyler thought they were supposed to be. Nathan was frantically pleading with his son to stop this and _think_, and at the very least to watch out for his supposed allies, since they were notoriously unreliable....

They had fought their way to something like even terms and then stalled, perhaps due to determination on the part of Tyler and the demons, perhaps due to fatigue on their own, and then almost surely out of weariness were losing again when Illyana arrived and the world suddenly went silver-sharp and then dank. No one slowed an iota, but Tyler's allies began to be systematically dispatched and carried off by Illyana's servants, and before long there were only the four humans still present, with Illyana nearest Tyler.

Stryfe watched Illyana's expression as she stared into Tyler's wild eyes, saw her heft the Soulsword in her hand as if thinking -- and knew what she planned half an instant before she drew her lips thin and swung the blade.

Cable lunged forward with the movement, and that slight expectation was the only thing that gave Stryfe enough of an edge to tackle him. Cable twisted underneath him, trying to get free, and arched his back to look despairingly up as the Soulsword swept in a wide slash through Tyler's chest and the boy went down, Illyana following him with an armored knee on his unmarked sternum and altering her grip on the hilt in preparation to stab. 

"How dare you -- unh! Get off me, Stryfe, that's -- she's --" Cable lurched sideways and almost got free. Stryfe felt his powers starting to return and used what small amount he had available to shove his "brother" back to the ground, or what was currently passing for ground. 

"If I have to sit on you until she's finished," Stryfe growled, "I will."

"She's killing him! Let. Me. UP!!!!" 

Stryfe managed in the course of the writhings to plant a knee firmly in Nathan's back, buying himself a few seconds to look up to where Illyana, with an expression of great concentration, held the Soulsword's blade stirring slightly within Tyler's brow. "You'll -- ugh -- thank me for this in a few minutes. I think." Cable spat curses at him and kicked upwards as best he could. "Of course you won't," Stryfe muttered. "What was I thinking? This is you."

He started when a hand touched his shoulder, and again when he realized it belonged to an extremely chastened looking Tyler. Illyana, sword and armor gone and with an expression of deep exhaustion on her face, peered at him from a little farther off than Tyler and nodded, and Stryfe carefully eased himself off Cable and went over to the young sorceress while Tyler knelt by Nathan.

"Father, I --" Never say you're sorry, right? "I understand now. I'm -- I mean --" 

"I know. Oh, Bright Lady, it's you again, now --"

**********

Nathan dragged his mind out of the other timeline as a telltale stinging in his eyes threatened to draw him into his alternate's tears. So that timeline had healed Tyler, as well....

Exhausted himself by the vicarious struggle, he slipped without really noticing into a deep sleep there in the corner. When he woke several hours later and started trying to alleviate sundry cramps and aches from the odd position, he knew he had had some very weird dreams, but couldn't remember them at all. 

A soft, nervous laugh from a few feet away brought him fully to his feet, surreptitiously still working his right shoulder. A rather exhausted-looking boy -- fourteen, maybe, but the blue patch stuck to his shoulder marked him, according to the identification system resorted to here, as a nurse responsible for one of the halls -- looked slightly embarrassed to have made the sound. "Sorry, sir. It just looked like an odd place to fall asleep."

Cable looked the boy over critically. Thin, wiry, physique... very sharp nose, rather the dominant feature of his face... dark circles under the eyes... and a general air of bemusement. "Don't apologize. Ah... is there anything I can do to help?" he asked gruffly. He'd just been lying around all this time -- granted, he'd sort of been shuffled aside several hours ago, but surely he could have found something more useful to do than --

"Staying out of the way for the past few hours was probably the best thing, to be honest," the boy told him with another slight laugh and a reassuring tone. "It's been a little hectic; we put most of the newest staff off duty until most of the initial running around was done." 

"Hectic. Not the shifts, I hope --?" He hoped it was the Legacy cure working, actually, but it was probably a little too soon for that, wasn't it? Scanning for any hint of the disturbance, however, Nathan realized that while it was too soon for it to have completed its work, the start of it was indeed the reason for things being "hectic." There had been no available preservation facilities for the finished product, so they had effected a massive reorganization in order to speed up delivery. 

The boy was saying as much. "The treatment has to be either used or chilled pretty much immediately, so while Stryfe was putting it together -- now that sounds strange -- we rearranged everyone and got ready to distribute it as quick as we could." He shook his head. "Really never occurred to us any version of him might _help_."

"I know the feeling."

"You would, wouldn't you? Oh -- my name's Will, by the way; we gave up on name tags a while back. Should I call you Cable?"

"That or Nathan." 

Will nodded. "Nathan then."

Cable looked at him keenly. "You masterminded that 'rearrangement,' didn't you?"

The boy shrugged. "I wouldn't call it masterminding." He wouldn't, but the memories Cable was seeing all said that was essentially the case. "It was the logical way to do things; I did guide the process a little." The kid's "guiding" skills were enviable, then. The normal result of trying to reorganize that many people and routines in the course of three hours, even if you didn't have to figure out the target system on the fly, was probably total chaos. 

"Stry -- er -- Christopher, I should say, is still making the rounds of some of the last few patients to be treated. I understand you're immune -- if you still want to do something, you could visit with some of them if you like. There's this one kid who'll talk your ear off about snakes if you'll listen --"

Cable finally found it in himself to crack a smile as he reached metal fingers into the pouch where his small pet nestled. "Think she'd like to meet one?"

"When she first woke up here, she cried for hours because the guy who found her hadn't brought the nest of pit vipers she'd holed up with. She'll be thrilled."

**********

Nathan was kneeling beside the girl's bed and half leaning on it, the little serpent tangled in his fingers and the child's much smaller ones (It was purring. Strange snake.), when a shadow fell over him and he looked up to see Stryfe coming through the door of what was currently one of very few private rooms in the hospital and had, in the original floorplan, been some sort of closet.   
  
"You," he observed to his clone, "look horrible." He did, too. Walking across the tiny expanse of floor to the bed looked to be taking an enormous amount of concentration, and Cable had experienced the sensation of relying almost purely on determination to prevent all his muscles from quietly allowing him to fold into a collapsed mess on the floor a few too many times to fail to recognize it from the outside. Granted, it was an unexpected enough phenomenon in Stryfe to give him a little trouble, but then, Stryfe tried to hide most of the same signs Nathan himself did, and he wasn't _that_ good an actor. 

"Thank you." Cable assumed that had been intended as sarcasm, though the voice didn't carry enough energy to be anything but flat. Stryfe blinked at him and appeared to make a deliberate effort to focus. "Should you be letting that snake close to her?" He stumbled a bit in the course of lowering himself to kneel on the opposite side of the bed from Cable, and hit the floor a little harder than he'd probably intended. 

The girl looked at him indignantly and chirped weakly, "That's my power. I'm a snake-charmer."

"She is, too," Cable corroborated with a half-smirk. "You may be glad to know I think I'm going to leave it with her."

"And maybe when I get better I can go find the tree you got it from!" Enormous brown eyes turned on Cable and sparkled at him. 

"I don't know if _that_ would be such a good idea...." Then again, she'd be lost in the shifts eventually; at least she'd have something to look for. Who knew, maybe her power could help her find snakes. At least she would have something to look for.

"As long as we're on the subject...." Stryfe interjected, lifting one hand to let it fall carefully on the girl's forehead and bringing the other to her throat, wincing slightly as one finger touched the purplish sore streaking her neck. "You'd best be asleep for this, I think." 

As the child's eyes drooped shut and Stryfe's half-closed as well, Cable frowned across the bed. "_Now_ what are you doing? I thought you mixed up something to cure them; shouldn't you be giving her something?"

"There was only so much I could make at one time, given what was available here," Stryfe sounded abstracted, or maybe half asleep, and wore an expression of deep concentration. "Not enough, by several patients. It will take longer to make the second, and for the first several days they will be vulnerable to reinfection. The rest --" He broke off, sweat beginning to be visible on his face. "I can't talk right now. Look if you must."

"If you let your --" Cable stopped as well, the request for Stryfe to let his shields down dying on his tongue as he realized Stryfe _wasn't_ shielding. At all. The mental noise had to be deafening, but he seemed to be ignoring it... or else his perception was dulled as well. 

A little investigation yielded the information that there had, in fact, been a shortfall by twenty-six patients, and when the antivirus had run out, Stryfe had begun stripping the virus out of the rest by molecular-level telekinesis. Well, if Nate Grey had been able to do transmutation, this wasn't really that astonishing. 

Cable estimated that even armed with the knowledge of exactly how to go about it, he'd personally have been dead within the first few patients if he had tried this stunt. About the time he started pulling energy away from the techno-organic virus, or even just ignoring it. 

He never would have expected Stryfe, even with his greater available power, to go this far. He wasn't shielding because, quite simply, he didn't have the energy to spare. Nathan thought being able to hear everyone in the entire hospital would outweigh whatever psi-energy or advantage of concentration was gained by not shielding, but this was not the time to start an argument. 

So. Stryfe was almost completely drained, and spending the last of his energy -- possibly enough to burn him out or kill him, though with his skill level that was unlikely given the controlled rate of expenditure and the lack of any unnatural amplification -- to clear the last remnants of a virus his own alternate had unleashed out of a little girl's body.

_Maybe I really SHOULD start calling him Christopher instead._ He uncomfortably extended a bubble from his own shields around Stryfe's mind. He didn't like the contact, but this one was obviously rather preferable to the one from his own timeline, and he'd survived having _that_ one stuck in his brain. 

Unwilling to risk intruding himself on the delicate process enough to help, for fear of disturbing it, Nathan only watched until a thin trickle of blood started from Stryfe's nose. Other than biting briefly at his upper lip, he didn't seem to notice. Cable caught it before it could drip on the bed, then carefully found the abused capillaries with his own telekinesis and sealed them off. Definitely a symptom of overexertion. 

He didn't think he'd ever seen Stryfe overexert his powers before. He'd wondered if he could. It puzzled some people how power that could (supposedly) crush a star could be taxed by something so simple as a virus -- but those people didn't know or didn't consider either the amount of energy tied up in atoms and chemical bonds, or the strain and energy-drain of locating and manipulating on such a small scale and with so mind-bogglingly many targets, without doing more damage than you repaired. It added up.

Stryfe finally halted -- Cable assumed he was through, and was at any rate fairly certain there was no way for him to get started again, so he'd better be -- and slumped exhaustedly over the cot. After a few seconds he shifted enough weight to one elbow that he could remove his hand from the girl's throat and push against the mattress, struggling back upright. Actually standing seemed a little beyond him for the moment, though.

"That --" a very slightly shaky finger indicated the purple blister "will have to heal on its own; I can't do any more. But it... will, now." 

"Right." Nathan watched as Stryfe climbed wearily to his feet and started an exaggeratedly steady progress back towards the door. "Was she the last?" She had better have been the last. Unless he could learn how to do that himself.... 

"Yes."

Carefully leaving the now-friendly serpent curled into the hollow of the girl's collarbone, he started out of the room and caught up just in time for Stryfe to sway slightly and then crumple against his shoulder.

His first impulse was actually to dodge, but by the time it got through the roadblock of disbelief he was already being leaned on. Stryfe, he discovered, was still conscious and trying valiantly to push away and stand on his own. Nathan thought this was a good idea.

He wasn't sure it was a feasible one, however, and in order to end the whole leaning situation -- which neither one of them was particularly thrilled with -- as expediently as possible without actually _dropping_ Stryfe, Nathan managed to push him around and prop him against the wall. 

Much better, even if he kept a hand warily hovering near Stryfe's shoulder to make sure he didn't slide down the wall to the floor. Nathan studied the exhausted psi for a long moment before saying slowly, "You really are different, aren't you."

Stryfe lifted his gaze as if it had weights attached to it. "You noticed."

"You forced it on my attention." Very dry.

"Wonderful." Stryfe slumped a little lower against the wall and shut his eyes for a second, then started blinking rapidly and tried to push himself back up. 

Nathan sighed and repropped him. "You can't walk, can you?"

"Of course I can." The ensuing effort was a little less than convincing, though Stryfe did make it to a fully vertical posture. Cable suspected, nevertheless, that the sidelong glances at the wall were an attempt to keep track of the proper direction of "vertical," which wasn't exactly promising.

"Of course."

Stryfe glowered at him, albeit not with the usual level of venom. "Give me a minute."

"We could just suggest Illyana teleport us out."

"I'd rather," Stryfe replied unwillingly, "not be in Limbo for... a little while longer. It's somewhere I'd prefer to be able to defend myself." 

Nathan blinked. "Wouldn't Illyana look after you?" Or was he worried about her reaction to finding out about Legacy?

"Yes." It was almost a hiss. "But it's not a habit I would like to become necessary." Nathan prodded the other's mind lightly. Point of pride, he would guess... and pretty accurately, too. Stryfe apparently lacked the magic-resistance Belasco had identified in Cable himself, but tearing up the occasional demon or horde thereof didn't necessarily require it. Even if several of them DID tend to reassemble themselves. 

"Rather have me do it?" he inquired lightly. 

"Stab your eyes." Stryfe exerted himself and pushed away from the wall, eyeing it warily as he swayed on his feet for a moment.

"I don't think you've tried that in a while."

"What, standing up or stabbing your eyes?" Nathan was actually mildly impressed that Stryfe had summoned the energy and spirit for a joke. He would have expected him to use it for an attack if he made it that far. Not that an attack would be terribly prudent under the circumstances. Nice thought.

"The latter." He speculated briefly on trying to go elsewhere, but decided Stryfe would probably have to be half carried. It could wait. He couldn't think of anything they were really in a hurry for at the moment. "I... suppose this is probably the kind of thing that made you and my alternate start getting along, isn't it?"

Stryfe laughed, weakly, and leaned on the wall again. "I wouldn't go quite that far...."

"That far?"

"So far as to say we 'got along.'" He gave the wall a rueful glance before continuing. "We got to where we tolerated each other's existence and could fight on the same side, but that's about it."

"For us," Nathan pointed out, "that qualifies."

Another exhausted laugh. "There is that."

"Well, then."

They were both silent for a few minutes. Tolerated each other's existence. Fought on the same side. Nathan turned these ideas over in his mind and decided that... he could deal with that. No expectation that he _like_ the man who'd killed his family, just that when they wound up as part of the same family in a time that had never heard of the war they'd fought, he quit fighting it. 

Still hard. A little easier knowing this version had saved lives as well as taken them. A little easier knowing that he'd still kill the Stryfe from his own timeline, or any that resembled it more closely, given the opportunity.

A little easier with the startling realization that this Stryfe would probably want to _help_.

Still -- 

Cable looked out from his contemplations and blinked as Stryfe divorced himself again from the corridor wall and began a relatively steady, if plodding, progress. Nathan caught up with less effort than it took to slow down, and paced the other man for several steps. "So was that it? Random acts of heroism on your part finally brought him around?"

"Not really." Stryfe seemed a little uncertain, not so much about his answer as about how much of Cable's question was sarcasm. Not a lot, in reality, but he didn't bother to explain that. There was the tiniest bite to the addition, "Nor was that what changed my mind about him."

Nathan refused to be baited. So he hadn't always been particularly heroic. Funny thought, almost, realizing that even if he'd been something of a maverick -- like Logan, maybe -- Stryfe had probably at least for a while been seen as significantly more cooperative by the X-Men. Oath, Stryfe had BEEN an X-Man. He wondered if his own alternate had kept on avoiding that designation.... "What did then?" 

Not completely willing, even despite the scryer, to dip into that particular mind enough to read what Stryfe might be thinking, Cable had almost decided that he wasn't going to get a response when Stryfe spoke up, his voice still tired and now matter of fact and level but a little bit thoughtful as well. "Family," he said softly. "We wanted the same people alive and well."

Well, then.

**********


	8. 8/10

**Unexpected Companions  
by Persephone  
Chapter 8/10**

**********

Limbo, Cable decided irrevocably, was weird. It was not going to matter what else he ever saw or heard or felt here. His observations so far were enough to establish the dimension as officially weird even if they were outweighed by thousands of instances of normalcy. Of course, Limbo was probably closer to its version of normalcy than most places now, and that should perhaps be taken into account. Nevertheless, it was weird.

Illyana had teleported them initially into what appeared to be a remarkably featureless plain except for a sort of spiderweb pattern of shallow cracks and thin little blades of sparse, grasslike brown vegetation. He wasn't sure what impulse prompted him to close a fist around one and yank, but when it came up easily, the only root a small, hard white blob, he gave it a much closer look and realized it was a hair.

"Illyana?"

"Hm?"

"Are we walking on _skin_?" 

"No. Just a facsimile of it."

How reassuring.

Silence descended again, while Nathan debated with himself the question of whether he actually wanted to find out what she'd say if he asked _why_ they were walking on a facsimile of skin.

They went down a hill, and walls suddenly loomed in front of them. One rather whimsical section several meters off to the right appeared to be, in fact, a loom. It was weaving. Considering the context, the fact that the walls looked precisely like congealed blood was even less encouraging than it might have been otherwise. 

A gate opened for them just as he began to wonder whether Illyana planned to walk directly into the wall. From inside, the walls were still red, but a less scab-like shade of it; he blinked in some confusion as the ornate doors of the gateway swung ponderously shut behind them and a round silver-white light blossomed on the ceiling to reveal a surprisingly cozy living room that would have looked perfectly at home in any number of small, pleasant houses if not for the color scheme, which seemed to be the result of a territorial war amongst red, blue, silver, pink, and black. Red had won the walls, mostly, and silver the light fixtures, while blue and pink mottled the ceiling, black took the majority of the furniture (though the others served as accents), and all five still wrangled for control of slivers of the carpet. Nathan tried to dismiss the feeling that hostilities still continued as paranoia. He was allowed a little paranoia, right? Even if it led him to imagine interior decorating in Limbo as a sort of negotiation process. 

The vibrant colors indoors contrasted sharply with the view through the windows on the opposite side of the room, all gray and brown and dull green -- it looked for all the world like a dead garden, with a withered oak tree standing its dismal vigil in the center. 

Stryfe crossed almost immediately, though his steps were still slow, to one window and stared out, as if mesmerized; Illyana looked out another for a moment and then pulled a tie loose and let the curtain ripple down across the panes, turning back and gesturing to the low table where food suddenly appeared. Silver dishes, this time, like the armor she only now let vanish with the sheathing of the Soulsword. Water droplets condensed on them as if they were freezing cold, even the ones supporting food that should have been -- and was -- hot. 

"You can tell me whether I conjure halfway decent coffee," she suggested with an almost impish smile. "Never tried it on your alternate." 

"I'm not sure if that would be such a good idea." He'd become used to going without caffeine, since the beginning of the destruction, and he knew he'd only be annoyed when he couldn't have it any longer. On the other hand, it did smell good. He bit back the urge to make some kind of joke about temptation.

Stryfe, whom he was still shielding, stopped actively thinking about giving him a mental kick in the ankle. Other than that, the man seemed oddly subdued... maybe it was just because he was so drained. Only, there was more than that, tickling at the inside of the shield....

"I promise, you don't get stuck here forever by eating or drinking," Illyana told him, perfectly seriously. She actually sounded worried.

"I didn't think I would."

"Well... it wouldn't have been that unreasonable a suspicion." She turned back toward Stryfe. "Hey. Dinner's ready."

"I'm --" Cable was almost certain Stryfe was going to finish that with "not hungry," but after a short pause he said "coming" instead, voice curiously flat, and started to turn away from the window. 

Illyana frowned at him. "Something the matter?"

"I'm fine." Stryfe stopped moving. Same tone, or lack thereof.

She folded her arms and scowled. "That's not very convincing; don't lie to me, please." Stryfe turned back to the window; a trace of astonishment crossed Illyana's face, followed by worry again. "Let me try rephrasing: _what_ is the matter?"

Nathan couldn't see his clone's hands, but knew beyond any doubt that they had both just tightened on the windowsill to the point that wood should have started to splinter. "You don't really want to know."

Trying to get out of telling her about Legacy? Illyana didn't seem, from what Nathan had seen so far, to be the type to let Stryfe get away with that. She didn't disappoint him. "That doesn't usually stop me."

"No. It doesn't."

"So tell me?" She stepped away from the couch and toward the window -- and Stryfe; when she was just beyond arm's reach he capitulated and suddenly began speaking.

"There were several of your alternates in the wards. One...." The voice was still flat, but less dully so; now it sounded... cold. He stopped, and swallowed, then went on. "One was among the... last few I had to attend to personally." A breath. "The next to last, to be precise. She died under my hands."

Next to last. So that was where Stryfe had been just before he dragged in to take care of the little snake-charmer....

So this one did know, now, what it was like to have someone you cared about die in your arms. Except, of course, that for him it hadn't been someone as close as Aliya, hadn't even been the child-friend from his own timeline. Not comparable, Nathan told himself. Not like losing a soulmate.

Not that Stryfe had claimed it was. Stryfe was doing a moderately good job of drawing his mind in on itself to avoid "touching" the shields Cable still maintained and seemed most inclined not to discuss the matter at all with him. 

"Of the disease your alternates released." Illyana's quiet voice did a fairly good job of sounding neutral. 

Stryfe's... did not. "Yes." 

The young sorceress sighed deeply and took the last step to him, laying one hand on his arm. He twitched away; the hand followed. "Christopher...."

"Don't."

"Don't what?"

He didn't answer. 

Illyana folded her arms. "You aren't fooling anybody, you realize."

There was a pause. Stiffly, and with obvious reluctance, Stryfe finally replied, "Maybe not."

"_Chris._ You tried. You can't blame yourself for what your alternates did, you know...." 

As if Stryfe didn't have enough things to blame himself for without looking to his alternates? 

"No?" Stryfe finally took his eyes away from the window again and looked at her; the glimpse Nathan caught was of the right one, surprisingly bleak. "No, I can't, but I came far too close to doing precisely the same thing myself, Illyana. I had every detail planned, everything in place to release an epidemic -- I didn't dismantle the preparations until after returning to Earth, and even then I think when I said I would go back with them, I was at least half expecting it... not to work, seeking occasion against them... looking for another reason to hate them." He looked away, back out the window at the dead tree. "Before I found out I had no good reason in the first place...."

Nathan realized with a start that Stryfe's control over his voice had slipped almost entirely by this point; he could hear in the tone a self-loathing that he'd never have expected, even after what he'd seen of this version's life and thoughts. It just didn't seem to fit.... He would have said the man deserved the feeling, of course, but this somehow wasn't especially satisfying. 

Illyana could hear it too, it seemed. "Stop it." This time, instead of simply touching Stryfe's upper arm, she ducked under it and insinuated herself next to his side. He moved as if startled, but didn't exactly protest. "You didn't release it. You changed your mind." 

"That -- what happened to your alternate, too many of your alternates, could all too easily have been your fate, Illyana. I almost killed you, don't you --"

"Don't I what?" she interrupted. "Understand? I get the idea, yes. Blame you? No. Almost doesn't count, not for this." She shook her head. "I've _almost_ done too many things myself... and actually done too many, I guess, for revenge or otherwise...."

"I don't think you ever started an epidemic."

"Neither did you," she retorted. "I _can_ plague-cast, you realize."

"Plague-cast?" 

She reached through a stepping disc, appeared to be feeling around, and then plunged her other hand in as well and heaved out a massive grayish-green tome. The air promptly filled with a nauseating sour odor, and Illyana grimaced. "No wonder Belasco always kept incense burning in his library...." The title, in letters of a remarkably unpleasant shade of yellow that seemed inclined to blur in and out of focus, read _Pestis Pestis_. 

There was a glint of light from Stryfe's eye, reflected in the windowpane, and the book suddenly appeared to be easier for the girl to hold. "And this is...."

"What it says." Illyana shrugged. "A book of disease-related spells, mostly curses. I know it. And I'd best put it back before someone wanted it or looked for it; it's burnt now...." She carefully balanced it back through the disc. "Not to mention while the air here is still semi-breathable. Ugh." A silver candle on the table flared to life and apparently started trying to deodorize the room. "Put it this way, I could make a distressingly good Pestilence."

Stryfe blinked at her several times. "No. No, you would not." 

She shrugged. "Well, if not for the fact that if I went that far I'd be more likely to want to conquer in my own name." 

This time, Nathan blinked at her too. She couldn't be serious. He thought about Limbo for a while. Maybe she could.

Illyana shifted her weight and sighed, looking up at his clone. "Christopher. Answer me one question? Truthfully?"

"What is it?"

"If Nathan weren't here, would you be trying to pretend you weren't upset?"

As the fact that Stryfe was upset was trying to rearrange Nathan's perceptions of him for the better again, with the expected high level of discomfort for such a procedure, Nathan thought that trying to hide the fact on his account would be rather stupid. It would also be fairly probable, on the other hand.... He wouldn't be inclined to hand Stryfe keys to his psyche either, given the option.

He entertained himself briefly by wondering if Stryfe was likely to come up with a response that would dodge the question successfully. There probably wasn't much point, considering Illyana obviously knew better....

"I don't know."

"Did I mention you aren't being very convincing?"

"I think so." Stryfe sighed and glanced unhappily toward Nathan, who looked back innocently for a moment, then gave up and considerately watched the colors in the carpet wrangle with each other. "I'd probably either not have told you at all or cry on your shoulder like a fool, how's that?"

Illyana squirmed closer to hug him again. Nathan looked up and shook his head slightly. "I won't watch, if you like." 

Stryfe glared at him.

**********

They'd left Limbo and started walking again. There was no particular reason to be walking, except that going somewhere was better than not going anywhere, when there was no place you really wanted to be. 

"There isn't even any real way to tell time anymore...." He was being morose again. He had the feeling this was starting to get on his current companions' nerves.

"Don't be silly. It's brillig," Illyana announced calmly.

"Brillig?"

"Brillig," she confirmed. "'Twas brillig, 'tis brillig now, and it can STAY brillig. Doesn't matter terribly. But if we meet a tove, I might get worried," she replied, swinging the Soulsword as she walked.

"Are you sure," Stryfe interjected dryly, "that it isn't always tea-time, and six o'clock instead of four?"

Nathan took a few moments to place that one, while Illyana laughed and some other part of his brain, not occupied with identifying what his clone was talking about, wondered if there might be something a little off about the atmosphere here. 

Oh. 

OH.

He remembered now -- "So we've quarreled with Time, and ever since he won't do a thing we ask?" he inquired acidly.

"I suppose you could put it that way," Stryfe replied mildly enough, after visibly biting back something with more venom. "With no one really at fault but the queen -- Nathan, did I just equate Apocalypse with the Queen of Hearts?"

He thought about it, then started laughing himself. Oath, this was the last thing he needed, Stryfe alluding to _Alice in Wonderland_ -- well, no, actually, it wasn't, he amended. The _last_ thing he needed was _Apocalypse_ talking about _Alice in Wonderland_. Apocalypse as... the Queen of Hearts.... "I think," he wheezed between laughter, "you did. What does -- that make you?" He thought some more. "Knave of Hearts?" he snickered.

Stryfe winced at that one. "I'd rather not, thank you," he managed, eyeing Cable rather uncertainly. 

The expression struck Nathan as even funnier. "F-fine then -- how about -- the March Hare?" More chuckles. A look from Stryfe which said, more eloquently than any words, that the source of the look was developing serious doubts about its target's mental well-being. Maybe he was hysterical, the analytical aspect of his mind suggested dispassionately. "Or the -- Mad Hatter?" 

Hardly able to walk now, Cable sat down on the ground, which turned out to be a vibrant shade of purple in this vicinity, and abandoned himself to laughter. The other two stopped to wait for him. It was almost definitely hysteria, he decided, by the time a niggling voice reminded him that HE must be the Mad Hatter, given _who_ had "quarreled with Time." 

Had that been why Stryfe mentioned the fault being elsewhere? That was unthinkable. That was... almost unthinkable. Only almost, after all he'd seen from the timeline this one belonged to. Only almost. Still helpless to halt his own laughter, Nathan looked up and saw Stryfe's lips twitching slightly.

"As I don't _think_ I want to be a rabbit, and considering what seems to have been the general opinion of my helmet, I suppose I can't deny that last one." 

"You make a nice rabbit," Illyana murmured. Nathan wondered if she was talking about the velveteen one again, and only snickered harder when Stryfe, apparently reaching precisely the same mental connection, actually blushed. Chaos-bringers didn't blush, huh? Maybe retired ones did. "But you've got Apocalypse misassigned," she continued in perfect solemnity. "He's the Dormouse! He hibernates, doesn't he?" 

Her last sentence was half drowned out as Stryfe joined Cable on the ground in hilarity at the very idea. Illyana simply stood over them, with a smirk composed of equal parts humor and self-satisfaction.

As soon as he had breath enough, Stryfe looked up at her and sputtered, "That -- was priceless, Illyana. We'll be sure to -- stuff him in a -- a tea-pot -- just for you." That sent both him and Cable -- who nodded in vigorous agreement -- off on another wave, while Illyana cast a ward and thanked them as gravely as she could, but with dancing eyes.

"And who are YOU?" Cable asked challengingly as the girl watched them, still on her feet. 

"Me? I'm Alice, of course; she was seven, too," she replied smoothly, grinning, and then blinked past him. "And on that note," she continued in some surprise, "we seem to have a flamingo." 

Cable looked over his shoulder and gaped as, with a snap of Illyana's fingers, a small gateway formed in the ward and a brilliantly pink flamingo strolled through. Stryfe followed his gaze. The flamingo picked its way past both the men and snuggled contentedly against a rather astonished Illyana, then pressed its beak to her nose. After a moment of wide-eyed shock, she looped an arm around the bird's neck and sank to the ground beside it.

The flamingo seemed to be remarkably amenable to having a sorceress giggle helplessly into its feathers. Cable hadn't been under the impression they were that even tempered. Then again, Stryfe seemed fairly fond of the girl, so a flamingo wasn't necessarily that shocking.

"If we start getting hedgehogs," he suggested thoughtfully, "we might want to leave."

Illyana raised her head. "A pack of cards! You're all just a pack of cards!" she proclaimed, before burying her face in pink feathers again. The flamingo endured this behavior without complaint. 

Nathan looked over at Stryfe as his clone frowned and picked a small item off the ground, extending it Cable's direction. Upon examination, the item proved to be... a hedgehog. In fluorescent orange. They both stared at it.

"Not only are we getting hedgehogs," Stryfe said as the creature nosed about on his hand, "we are getting _punk_ hedgehogs." Cable snickered. Stryfe eyed the hedgehog again and added, "I think I agree with you, odd as this may seem. Perhaps we should move on."

"Are we bringing the flamingo?"

"Ask Illyana."

Nathan wondered if perhaps they wouldn't do better to ask the flamingo, which opted to strut daintily alongside Illyana with no apparent concern as to whether it was welcome or not. It periodically munched glowing red land-shrimp off the ground.

**********

They still had the flamingo three shifts later, although ever since they'd stepped through the line, the bird had been pressing closer and closer to Illyana. It was starting to interfere with her ability to walk.

There was something... eerie... about this shift. A little bleak. More... cohesive, somehow, than most of the worlds he'd walked through, Nathan thought, but he had no idea how he was getting that impression. It felt a little like Limbo, too, though he'd never have thought to call Limbo unusually cohesive before....

#Nathan?#

Mental contact with Stryfe was not the eerie part, even if it did come as something of a surprise. They'd both rather gladly relinquished it as soon as Stryfe's shields were back up, and had kept strictly to vocal conversation since that point. 

Presumably, however, there was a reason for it. Stryfe had been as relieved not to have to be shielded by Nathan as Nathan had been not to be shielding him anymore. #What?#

#Have you noticed anything... odd... about this shift?#

#Have you noticed any shifts that DIDN'T have anything 'odd' about them?#

#Nathan....#

#All right, all right. I got the feeling when we first entered it that we'd walked back into Limbo instead, but Illyana didn't say anything -- I figured it might be just some kind of increased connection.#

Stryfe turned to stare at him. #_Just_? She's been peering around looking agitated ever since. Obviously I should have said something to _someone_ by now....#

#Does it matter if we're in a shift closer to Limbo? We've been _to_ Limbo.# 

#Yes, and there's a different Illyana controlling the... parts... of it closest to this world.#

Nathan thought about this. Stryfe shook his head in annoyance and turned to Illyana to ask quietly, "What's the matter?"

"Limbo." What a surprise. "It's... not under quite the same management; I can feel it... and I can feel it... bound to this world. Especially where I think New York is." She sounded troubled. "It's been getting more intense as we move; I didn't put a name to it at first...."

"Different management." Stryfe hesitated. "Belasco?"

"No!" Illyana shuddered. "Not him. I can sort of... tell... my alternate's around, but there's someone else."

"That would," said a new but unnervingly familiar voice, grandly, "be me."

Nathan stared. He only just caught at the edge of his vision Stryfe turning, eyes wide, to do the same.

Bright eyes, one glowing bright gold, looked back at them from a very familiar face. Gold hair spilled down over midnight armor shot through with a network of electric-blue lighting. 

"Tyler?" Nathan managed, after spending what seemed an unconscionably long moment frozen in shock. His voice, unfortunately, emerged as a rather faint croak.

Tyler lifted an eyebrow at him and produced a glass of water from, evidently, thin air. Cable took it automatically, noticed the odd look Illyana was giving all parties concerned, and just held onto it. 

"I'd say 'the one and only,'" Tyler replied easily, "except that I'd run into quite enough alternates of quite enough people to realize how silly that phrase was even _before_ the shifts." 

He raised a hand to stroke his chin, the light from his eye dimming as he half-lowered the lids. "Now what shall I do with you? I think my lady would care to meet... _you_ in particular, Illyana." 

He stepped closer, suddenly, to catch up her silver-gloved hand and bow a kiss onto it. Stryfe twitched as if his impulse had been to block Tyler away. Something in Illyana's stance and expression suggested that she might have dodged if there hadn't been a flamingo behind her knees. It wasn't exactly hostility, but went a little beyond wariness.

She withdrew her hand a little more rapidly than was strictly decorous. Tyler narrowly but gracefully avoided being bonked on the nose in passing.

"And why would your lady be interested?" Illyana inquired.

"To meet her alternate, and in such company? Why wouldn't she?" 

"Illyana is 'your lady' in what sense, exactly?" Cable cut in. Stryfe threw him a look he couldn't quite read, though it seemed to hold both anxiety and, strangely enough, gratitude. 

"Both of them... father." Tyler took a half-step back from Illyana and pivoted to meet Nathan's eyes. "Lady of Limbo, my wife and liege." 

"Bit young for you, isn't she?"

"Not necessarily," Illyana murmured.

"Isn't Domino a bit young for _you_, father?"

That cut; Nathan couldn't quite restrain a flinch. 

He followed when Tyler started walking and beckoned them along, almost automatically, and tried to ignore the inky-black cape that rippled and snatched at the air in a fashion worryingly reminiscent of -- 

#Stryfe?#

#What?#

This sounded stupid. #Tyler is not wearing one of those octopus creatures. Is he?#

Stryfe gave him a startled look. #No.# A little too hasty, that. A pause. #It's the wrong shape.#

#Stryfe, it could turn into fog. Why not a cape?#

#I really don't think it is. If it were native to Limbo I think Illyana would have recognized it, anyway....# Stryfe shrugged, reached out, and tweaked a corner. #Feels like cloth.#

Tyler turned to frown at him. "Did you want something?"

"Just checking whether your cape is predatory," Stryfe replied swiftly, then managed a grin to counter Tyler's raised eyebrow. Nathan snorted to himself. It was always fun to tell the absolute truth when you didn't want people to know it and it was too absurd to be believed.... "No, seriously. How did you get involved with Illyana?"

"Still haven't developed a personal life of your own to be nosy about, I see."

Stryfe looked offended. 

Illyana murmured something that sounded like, "You want details?"

Cable jumped in. "He wouldn't have to be nosy about his own. And you weren't with Illyana in my world either; I was wondering about that myself."

"Oh, you two _aren't_ from the same timeline, are you?" Tyler looked thoughtfully at them. "Perhaps that's why you get along so well." 

"Are you deliberately avoiding the question, or is your attention span really that bad?" Illyana broke in tartly.

Tyler laughed softly at her. "Ask your alternate." She scowled at him. "I could become fond of you all too easily. To put it briefly -- she asked. Less briefly -- hm. The story didn't begin with this, but the telling might as well. Once upon a time my grandmother listened to rebels from Illyana's realm in her dreams, and agreed to help them by sacrificing her baby boy."

So far, so... familiar.

"New York went mad along with her, as Limbo leaked through." Golden-auraed figures appeared alongside them, in miniature, and kept pace, flickering rapidly in a quick and slightly vague silent rendition right up until the point of crisis. Illyana was frowning at them; Nathan reached for her mind to ask why, and ran into Stryfe doing the same thing. 

#It's what I remember -- to a point. I have no idea what my alternate's starting to do _at_ that point, though....#

Well, if she didn't know, Nathan certainly wasn't likely to, but it seemed that Tyler was going to tell them. "But my lady thought of a way to repair the damage, restore her control of Limbo, and bind herself to Earth and home: if killing young Christopher was to seal her defeat and loose Limbo upon Earth, giving her foes the victory, what would be the most logical way to thwart them but --"

"To marry his son, firstborn or youngest ideally, who would have inherited the tinges of magic from Limbo and Loki both," Illyana interrupted flatly.

Tyler paused mid-gesture and turned to blink at her. "That was a rhetorical question. I thought you didn't know."

She shrugged irritably. "I wouldn't have known how and accordingly didn't think of trying it at the time. You just made it obvious."

"How did she know he _had_ a son old enough?" Stryfe asked. "You can't assume time travel --" He broke off. "But she could, couldn't she." 

"I should hope so," Illyana murmured, in a much more agreeable voice than she'd directed at Tyler. "She wouldn't have restricted herself to the same time if it had been inconvenient."

"Not at all," Tyler replied cheerfully. "I'm not wholly certain she _did_, though I suppose she couldn't have reached far. And she didn't pick you, by the way, because cloning apparently doesn't -- or at any rate didn't in this case -- pass along the magical exposure."

If Tyler had hoped to get a rise out of Stryfe with this comment, he was disappointed. 

He shrugged and started walking again, with a casual wave at his memory-scene as he -- in his role as Tolliver, of course -- appeared in it via stepping disc and began what was presumably a heated argument with the Magik who had summoned him, who looked to be on the edge of being the Darkchilde.

Possibly over it.

"Of course, I wasn't much of an improvement, in terms of rationality," Tyler went on ruefully. "She tried to explain. I yelled at her. She mentioned my infant father; I ranted on about my grievances. Finally she stabbed me in the head with the revenge I kept going on about; oddly enough this actually worked."

The image of Illyana backed half a step and whipped the Soulsword free, lunging before Tolliver could do more than look shocked. He had barely begun to try to dodge when the tip pierced his head. 

The tableau froze like that; Nathan couldn't tell at first whether everyone had really stilled or Tyler had paused the memory replay. Then he saw Illyana's extended arm start to tremble ever so slightly with the strain, and her tail lashed once, violently, and recoiled loosely around her own ankle.

Then they broke apart, the sword blade describing a careless arc as it dropped toward the ground, and stared at each other. Tyler touched a hand to his forehead and stared at his unbloodied fingertips for a moment, then back at Magik. His lips moved. 

Cable looked away from the image as the exhausted sorceress started to answer. "What did you say to her?"

"You couldn't tell? -- No, I suppose not. I couldn't really see myself at the time. Something along the lines of 'Why don't you go over all that again?'"

"I'm sure she was thrilled to discover you hadn't been listening."

"I'm sure she already knew," Tyler retorted crisply.   
"So... you two repeated the entire previous conversation."

"Of course not. Only the important parts, such as what was going on and why exactly my marrying her was supposed to remedy the situation. As you might imagine, I was somewhat disconcerted."

Nathan supposed that those had indeed been the crucial issues at the time. "Never figured your love life would involve a semi-demonic teenager kidnapping you to announce you had to marry her to save the world? Can't say I blame you for not thinking of that...." At least, that appeared likely to be the gist of what the Illyana-image was saying. It might have been nice if Tyler had opted to incorporate sound instead of narrating.

"The possibility had never crossed my mind. Although I will admit that a little investigation into family history might led me to the conclusion that perhaps I should not have been quite so _surprised_."

"So you married her." 

Tyler gestured at the memory-play as the image of him stepped close, enfolded the Darkchilde in his arms, and kissed her on the mouth, heedless of hard reddish skin or forked tongue or the fangs that cut his lips until the blood ran. Out of the corner of his eye, Nathan saw the Illyana actually present wince. The image of her alternate, meanwhile, started to relax; horns and tail shrank away, skin softened to her natural color, though armor-clad, and the fangs retracted.

Tyler did open his eyes when the transformation of her face was complete, and looked a little startled at the extent of the change. She sheathed the Soulsword when he reclaimed her lips, though, and the silver melted away.

"What else could I do, really? I pulled out enough of her memories to be fairly certain she wasn't lying, and if the antics in New York were any indication I didn't want to see S'ym and Nastirh spread their influence any farther. Discovering that my lady was in fact good company and very pretty was nice, though."

The image vanished. 

"Why does it feel like New York's still bound to Limbo?" Illyana's voice was very cool; Nathan started to wonder whether she had had further interactions with the Tyler of her own timeline that might shed some light on her apparent distaste for this one, or if this one just gave her the creeps on his own merits. The latter WAS entirely possible....

"It is." Tyler sounded genuinely surprised -- for the first time -- at the question. "It's not necessarily an ideal situation, but the closer binding of Limbo to Earth _has_ let us keep track of... well... a lot of the people and most of the planet, we think. We can find most of the fragments of the timeline from Limbo, you see, because of their attachment. Mostly ones that originated after the binding, though. ...I gather they're not so bound in your world?"

"No. No more than before, at least. Not like that. I couldn't do that." She sounded troubled.

Tyler didn't comment.

Nathan finally asked the question that had been nagging at him. "What happened to our alternates? Stryfe and I were both in that part of the 20th century, at least in the timelines I know of where we came back at all. Where are they?"

"Well, little Christopher was sent home with his parents, once Madelyne was calmed down. If you mean your adult time-traveling alternates, which of course you do...." Tyler turned and gave them a dazzling smile. "Naturally, they still work for me."

**********


	9. 9/10

**Unexpected Companions  
by Persephone  
Chapter 9/10**

Dinner was strange.

This wasn't exactly a surprise, but frankly, dinner was strange even for Limbo. The food wasn't that bad, though Nathan noticed that the aftertaste started before he swallowed now. It nearly choked him the first time.

He was also of the unvoiced opinion that escargot should not be served in melon rinds. Or live. He had eaten stranger things, but a giant snail that first tried to crawl off his plate (after he initially mistook it for a canteloupe) and then waved pathetically at him when he picked it up by the rind -- er, shell -- and turned it over... just didn't inspire him to stick a fork in.

He swallowed hard and surreptitiously put the creature on the ground beside his chair while his hostess was busy being scrupulously polite to the Illyana they had brought with them. It was a very correct, superficially friendly, hospitable in every practical way sort of courtesy with an underlying strained chill.

He didn't think they liked each other much.

#Of course they don't. They're both looking at might-have-beens.#

#We look at each other and see might-have-beens, Stryfe.#

A pause. #That's only supporting my argument, you realize.#

Nathan thought about it. #I guess so. I'd been thinking it might be territorial.#

#Us or them?# 

#Them. I suppose you could make the same argument, though.#

#It looks like they're both doing fairly well, though.#

Stryfe caught Tyler's eye briefly by accident and looked away. #Each is doing well in her own way, I suppose. I like mine better.#

Cable had to stifle a laugh with a bite of something spinach-colored that tasted like oranges. #Somehow I'm not surprised. Which surprises me, come to think of it.#

#Care to explain?#

#I'm not surprised you like the one you're friends with better than the one who's apparently more experienced, more powerful, and more influential on Earth as well as in Limbo. It's strange not to expect you to prefer the latter.#

There was a long pause. #Illyana is the only ruler I have actually liked since I was... twelve.#

#I imagine Apocalypse would put almost anyone off.#

#Probably.# Stryfe chewed somewhat morosely on a piece of green bread. It wasn't moldy, just green. After a moment, he added, #Thank you for the save. I somehow doubt my alternate ever told you.#

Cable stared at him for all of thirteen seconds before recovering from the shock enough to behave normally. #I just nearly fell out of my chair.#

#That wasn't my intention.#

#Sure it wasn't.#

#Believe what you like. Nathan, do you think the giant snails are intended as food, ornamentation, or pests? This one is stealing my soup.# 

The snail was indeed, with utter disregard for the fact that it had arrived at the table on a plate of its own, burying its head in Stryfe's bowl with every evidence of enjoyment. Or perhaps Nathan was imagining this, as he was hard pressed to specify any particular evidences a snail could give of enjoyment or particular behaviors this one was exhibiting that would qualify. 

Well, the perceptibly falling level of liquid in the bowl might be one....

#I gather they aren't a normal feature of 'your' Illyana's dinners in Limbo, then?#

Stryfe was frowning in the direction of this phenomenon, but seemed to find neither the soup nor the snail sufficiently appetizing to do anything about the situation. #No, but then, I don't recall her ever giving a formal one.# 

#I'm guessing, since they were brought in on plates and don't look especially decorative to me, that they're supposed to be part of the meal,# Nathan suggested after a short pause. 

#Nathan, you wouldn't believe what some people think is decorative,# Stryfe thought back absently, still watching the snail eat his dinner with apparent fascination. #I noticed you seem to have disposed of yours via another route.#

So he hadn't been quite surreptitious enough. At least their hosts hadn't commented. #I felt sorry for it,# Nathan replied a little defiantly. #And while I've eaten stranger and significantly more disgusting, that was usually when there were no better alternatives.# 

The frown had been replaced by a faintly amused smile, and the snail, having apparently exhausted the supply of free liquid, lifted its head with a chunk of some unidentifiable solid and waved it in the air triumphantly before, presumably, swallowing. 

Nathan somehow doubted that Stryfe was being that entertained by the snail.

#Don't get so defensive.# Yes, Stryfe was definitely laughing at him. #However coddled you might think I am, I _have_ foraged on occasion, although this bears more resemblance to something served as a delicacy. Except someone would have painted the shell, maybe....#

Painted the shell? #Did Apocalypse make a habit of serving live food at his banquets, since you have such a good idea of how it should be presented?# Nathan inquired a bit sarcastically. 

Stryfe actually looked up at him for a moment, at that. #He did occasionally, but this wouldn't have been his idea. He didn't see any point to serving a live course unless it was likely to fight back.#

Nathan got a sudden mental image of a bizarre hybrid between a bullfight and a formal dinner, complete with matador.... Wait.... That _couldn't_ explain the cape, could it?

His own soup had been unmolested by his snail, which couldn't reach it from under the table without heroic effort and probably not even then, so Nathan had actually been eating it. Stryfe gave him a very strange look when he started laughing and nearly spit it across the table in an effort not to choke. 

#What?#

#Never... mind.# Nothing in Stryfe's expression or tone had indicated whether the image had been his doing or merely a bizarre creation of Nathan's own mind, and Nathan was not about to ask.

Stryfe picked up the snail by the shell -- or rind -- and turned it over, inspecting its underside curiously and, perhaps, a bit dubiously. #If it's meant to be food, I wonder if you're supposed to put salt on it?#

**********

The meal ended eventually, and the guests were graciously invited to spend the night.

This despite the fact that Stryfe eventually got bored with having his dinner stolen and -- wary of the consequences of eating something alive in Limbo, given the weirdness of the usual fare he'd tried there -- released his own snail under the table. This wouldn't have been a problem except that it and Cable's erstwhile serving proceeded beneath the furniture until they encountered one another and fought. 

Melon-shelled snails could make a surprising amount of noise.

Tyler voiced everyone's thoughts and broke the slightly embarrassed silence resulting from the combat's discovery by commenting on how appropriate it was.

They were still asked to stay. In an actual building, in actual bedrooms. As actual as anything got in Limbo, anyhow. Nathan kept trying to shake the uncomfortable feeling that the entire palace was some sort of illusion and would dwindle away during the night to the blood-clot its building stones resembled. 

They were kind of crystalline. Maybe it would help if he thought of them as ruby quartz, like Scott's visor.

No. No, that didn't help. Not at all.

Nathan shuddered and forced himself to concentrate on the immediate. Disrobe. Shower. The shower spouted hot water, _not_ blood, even though the red tiles reflected in it. He preferred the wildly erratic color scheme the other Illyana had used to this monochrome dark red. 

Something in the atmosphere of the place seemed to be getting to him. He kept almost thinking he saw Nastirh peeking around a corner at him. Nathan wondered whether this sort of paranoia and the feeling of having been blanketed in gloom was a normal product of Limbo or a function of his own state of mind. If the mood was intrinsic to Limbo rather than himself, he could see why Illyana and Stryfe chose to camp instead. At least Illyana. Seven years here was probably enough.

He found himself fighting a growing unease that had nothing to do with the decor. He finally pinpointed it -- he was expecting his belongings, or even more likely Stryfe and Illyana, to disappear on the other side of a shift-line, even though he hadn't felt one since they crossed over to this shift. 

There shouldn't be any, should there? This was Limbo, after all.

Or was it?

If shifts didn't come to Limbo, then it stood to reason that they had at least entered this world on Earth. He didn't remember a distinct transition. This Earth was so strongly bound to Limbo, however, that he couldn't be sure.

Still, it seemed more likely that they were still on Earth -- which spoke volumes about this timeline's Magik and Tyler. 

Illyana would know. 

Nathan thought to himself that he was being quite silly as he methodically fit everything he had brought with him back into his pack. And that did mean everything, as their hostess had apparently conjured them all a change of clothes that they were apparently meant to keep.

As long as the garments didn't eventually reveal a predilection for spontaneously disintegrating, vanishing, changing form, sticking unnaturally, or causing a rash or worse problems, this was a good thing. 

Then he picked up the bag and went down the hall and across a rather nonsensically placed indoor footbridge to knock on Illyana's door.

"Come in." It opened before he could touch it; in fact, it opened without anyone else in range to touch it. 

Nathan blinked. Illyana was lying on her stomach on her bed, feet in the air, and Stryfe was sitting on the carpet as if he'd been talking to her until he turned to look at the door. Nathan rather thought Stryfe had been the one to open the door.

The bed was at the other end of an enormous expanse of floor.

"Nice room," Nathan managed after a moment. Could Stryfe have been thinking along the same lines he had, or had he just come in to talk to Illyana, and if the latter, was he intruding? 

"It should be. She's royalty here, you know." Stryfe eyed him for a moment. "She did invite you in. Are you planning to stand in the doorway all night?"

"No." Nathan went in, closing the door behind him and feeling even sillier about his pack until he caught sight of Stryfe's. Maybe they _had_ had the same feeling.... 

He carefully didn't step on the threshold. Remembered some old warning about that, and in Limbo, he had the feeling one never knew. 

That reminded him. "Are we in Limbo?" he asked abruptly as he sat down on the floor. "Or is this Earth... like this?"

"We're on Earth." Illyana sighed and looked around the room. "A piece of it brought particularly close to Limbo, but definitely Earth. One reason I don't much like her solution, even if it has worked well... especially after the shifts started."

"I see." He looked at Stryfe. "Why are we collecting in here anyway?"

Stryfe shrugged. "Why do we ever put up with each other?"

"Good question." 

"If you two start fighting...."

Stryfe looked up at Illyana. "We'll be good."

Illyana threw a pillow at him.

Nathan shook his head, blinking. Even with the rest of the world going mad, Stryfe being fondly teasing still tripped his weird-meter. 

Stryfe fielded the pillow and kept it. Illyana grabbed another one -- half the bed appeared to be covered with them; Cable wondered how she was expected to sleep on it without knocking them off -- and flopped down on it. "You know, I could teleport both your beds in here. The building's pinned to Limbo in enough places that there _probably_ won't be any shifts overnight, but.... Well, there's room."

This was certainly true. It was also true that from the shop talk on sorcery and Limbo over dinner Nathan had gathered that the "probably" meant that a shift through the palace was vanishingly unlikely (stepping discs, on the other hand, were a different matter). It was still furthermore true that he knew and Stryfe most likely knew that she was being nice and not pointing out that they both found the place creepy. Then again, she probably did too.

"That would be good."

"Thanks."

"Incoming," the girl announced calmly, and glowing white circles deposited the furniture in question neatly on the floor. Stryfe immediately took possession of the nearest one. Nathan eyed him. He looked smug. 

After a moment's consideration, Nathan grabbed him and dumped him off the bed. 

"Hey!" Stryfe yelped and climbed back on. 

"_I_ didn't promise to be good."

Illyana took one look at them as they paused, both sitting on the bed, to glower at each other, and burst into giggles. "WILL you two behave?" 

"He started it," Stryfe pointed out. This failed to help her efforts to stop laughing and breathe normally. 

"Oh, very mature," Nathan told him.

"And throwing me on the floor was?"

"It's _you_."

"Are you two making up for not having gotten to fight when you were, say, three or four?" Illyana inquired as soon as she could catch her breath. "Nathan. Over THERE." He looked at her for a moment without moving, then found himself swallowed by a stepping disc and deposited an instant later on the other bed. "I think that's the one from your room anyway."

A little more verbal sniping, a few trips to take advantage of the amenities of an actual building -- surprisingly modern in technology; it seemed incongruous given the general air of antiquated sorcery -- and they settled down in a sort of eerie half-light to rest. 

**********

When Nathan opened his eyes, it was to a room bathed in an eerie low light. Not the blue-silver-gray that was normal for night vision, no, this was very distinctly tinted red. Like a darkroom... or maybe like what Scott would have seen through his glasses in dim light.

Scott's night vision had never been the best. Slym's had been better. Having to look through a layer of colored rock could do that. Neither one had ever seemed to have much trouble with even the brightest sun, though. Even in the desert....

He closed his eyes again and fought against tears. 

"Nathan." 

He tensed. "Stryfe." Just as well they were whispering; his voice couldn't give anything away.

Silence.

"Well? What?"

"Never mind." 

He heard Stryfe move, and next time he looked over his clone -- clone's alternate -- had his back to him. Huh. "How trusting," Cable said under his breath, then pulled his pack closer to him on the bed and extracted the scryer from it. The film seemed to be remarkably durable, as Illyana had assured him the first time he tried to pack it, for all it looked like a milky soap-bubble; apparently the admonition not to touch it had been specifically for him. 

The silver-white film almost managed to shake off the tinge of pink that the light tried to impart.

When he stared into it, he finally saw things in real color again.

It was a relief, at first.

**********

It hadn't been long since she first remembered being Magik that Stryfe found Illyana curled up in a chair with headphones on, staring at nothing. The book she'd been reading was being ignored, two pages waving almost straight up in the middle. 

He crouched down beside her to listen. She had the volume turned too loud, he noted absently.

That might be why she hadn't yet noticed he was there.

~_I am shielded in my armor  
Hiding in my room  
Safe within my womb  
I touch no one and no one touches me._~

Simon and Garfunkel. "I Am a Rock." A bleak song, overall. Not what she needed to be hearing.

He knew the CD, and reached with his mind to the controls to push it ahead a few tracks. "Bridge over Troubled Water" should be a considerable improvement. 

Illyana twisted around to look at him indignantly, but burst into tears within the first few lines. Stryfe stood up and took a step back, wondering a little uncomfortably if she'd taken the lyrics as... a message of some sort, as if he meant them.... 

Not that he _wasn't_ on her side, and so forth, but he hadn't exactly intended....

"Stryfe." Ororo's voice fell on his ears like ice, and he turned to face her with a speed that probably made him look guilty. "What have you done to her?"

"Nothing. Just switched the song she was playing."

"Why?"

"I... thought it would be a better choice for her to hear." He didn't need to be on the defensive; he hadn't done anything objectionable....

"It's all right, Ororo." Illyana popped her head up from her arms, tears on her cheeks and bright hair tumbling around the headphones as she pushed them down to her neck. She sniffed. "He was right. I was brooding." A wry smile. "His family has a nasty streak that way; I suppose he's good at diagnosing it."

"Is weeping preferable, Illyana?"

Illyana's face grew wistful. "Oh, Ororo... you don't know how hard it's been for me to cry, lately. And these are good tears."

**********

Not long after that, Illyana went running in the morning, spent a short stretch of afternoon in contemplation, and quietly got up very early the next day. She munched an apple and some peanuts she wasn't supposed to have in her room, went to the drawer where she'd secreted her old New Mutants outfits after hunting them down the previous evening, held up the white costume, and then quietly crumpled it back into the drawer.

Then she pulled on the old "bumblebee" uniform from her New Mutant days -- one nice thing about the material was that it was elastic enough to fit despite her body being less mature than the last time she'd put it on. _One size fits all, I guess._ She thought about teleporting, then decided against it and went quietly down to the Danger Room, sat down against the wall beside the door, and waited for her old teammates.

Cable was supposed to be taking over the day's training session, for the first time since his return, and had deliberately set it for an hour and a half earlier than Cyclops normally did. He was standing inside waiting for them thirty minutes before that when Illyana took a surreptitious peek through the observation windows and then ducked quickly back out of sight, but he hadn't been looking up. 

She got up from behind the door as X-Force yawned through the door, drawing a few startled looks and greetings before they all made it through and she presented herself with them. Cable looked them over and halted at Illyana.

"What do you think you're doing here?"

It was an understandable question. It was also a very annoyed one. Illyana and Cable had not gotten off to the greatest start. She was eleven years old and considerably smaller than any of X-Force. And she was certainly not invited to the training session. It promised to be brutal. 

She was looking forward to it, in a weird way.

"I want to train." _Don't sound arrogant, don't sound arrogant! You know you're going to screw up at first._

Cable folded his arms and gave her a withering look. "This room," he pointed out sardonically, "is reserved at the moment. Go train somewhere else and stay out of my way."

"I meant I want to train with you." She glanced to the side, picking out Sam and Roberto before she looked back up at Nathan. "I was on the New Mutants, when that was a team."

"Kids. You were kids. They've grown up since then; you're -- actually younger than you were at the time. We aren't _playing_ here, little girl." 

Illyana bit down hard on her temper as it kindled; she hated being talked down to. "I know you aren't."

"If this is some kind of stupid joke --"

"Ah don't think she's joking, Cable," Sam spoke up quietly. "If she remembers being Magik, she remembers how to fight. Ah'd let her stay."

Cable gave Cannonball a long look. When his eyes snapped back to Illyana she thought of lightning. "You can stay -- just as long as you aren't a hindrance. You won't use the Soulsword. You won't get any special treatment for being small, young, weak, or inexperienced, and if you can't keep up, you're going to hurt by the end of the morning." He smiled coldly. "Actually, I expect you'll hurt even in the unlikely even that you can keep up. Still want to stick around?"

"Yes."

She stayed.

Illyana decided about twenty minutes later, about the time the seaweed peeled itself off the walls and tried to eat them, that Cable was afraid they might think he'd gone soft. Also that there might be something odd about the atmosphere on Graymalkin. 

He changed environments on them until she lost count and made them run two missions of his own from the 38th century. 

From both sides, "since you've all been spending so much time around Stryfe." 

It was a very frustrating session for Illyana. She _wasn't_ part of the this team -- she'd known that -- and while Sam did his best to incorporate her, no one quite knew what to do with her. 

Except for Shatterstar, who saw the knife she'd brought in her hand and flipped his own swords into the air long enough to use her as a projectile before he caught them again. 

It was cheating to use a spell to interfere with the electronics so that she sailed through the spot where she should have smashed against a force field protecting the image of a younger, armor-clad Stryfe opposing them. 

She didn't care. 

The flicker of expression on Nathan's face when she drove the knife between chin and metal collar was worth it. Seeing the flicker was worth the smashing blow she took for not paying attention. 

She wasn't going to do it again, though. It missed the point. 

Of course, the real Stryfe would never have let her get that close. Not in combat, anyway, she corrected herself. She'd spent a fair amount of time at closer range than that being read to. Of course, he might have been a little more reluctant about that if she'd been carrying a knife.

Teamwork in combat was a little tricky for her. Even the self-defense training she'd received in the last few years had focused primarily on how to protect herself when no one else was available to do so. 

In Limbo... she'd fought alongside Cat. Hunted alongside Cat, too. Other than that, when she'd been able to do anything at all to protect herself and sometimes when she hadn't, she'd been on her own. When someone had fought for her there had rarely been anything she could do to help. 

Maybe Cat was why she kept gravitating towards Feral. Style was different... but there was a certain disturbing similarity to Cat _after_ Belasco tamed her mind. 

The worst part, though, was exactly the problem she was doing this to remedy. She could see what she _should_ be doing, but when it came to carrying it out... time and again, she failed. She was reasonably fit; she'd always been active -- but she didn't have the strength or speed or reach or endurance she remembered from the teenager she no longer was and wasn't yet. She was smaller and less hardened, and her muscles lacked the memories her mind had rediscovered and now expected of them. 

So she fell too often, fell short much too often, and was knocked down when she shouldn't have been there to be hit. She picked herself up every time, half the time imagining she smelled the sulfur-ridden dirt of Limbo's wastelands across the burning in her throat and lungs. The sharp pain of bruises faded more readily under adrenaline than the deeper ache in muscles she continued to force through moves they protested, and sweat slicked her knife-grip and stung where she'd scraped her knee through the fabric. 

Eventually, she started improving her estimates, recovering and clarifying what her abilities really were _now_ and bringing her attempts within those boundaries. She learned. Painfully. 

She still wasn't impressed. She rather suspected that Cable, who watched everything and everyone but still managed to make her feel his coolly assessing gaze on her every move and fault and fall, was even less so. 

But she did better.

That, she reminded herself, gritting her teeth against pain and humiliation, was the point. Besides, this was mild. The monsters threatening to eat her if she failed weren't even real.

She'd gotten herself into it, too, so she didn't join in the semi-good-natured grumbling. The other reason for that was that she didn't think she had the spare energy to talk.

"End program." 

The images winked out and Illyana stumbled as the solid-light rock she'd been standing on disappeared. It took her a moment to realize that Cable wasn't going to start up a new one, or maybe come in and play reverse-tag the way Magneto used to. 

"That's enough for today -- or at least all we have time for at the moment, since the X-Men are taking over the room in a few minutes." He paced in front of them, offering up quick commentary, and stopped for a little longer in front of Illyana before addressing her. 

She pushed damp hair that had escaped its ponytail off her face.

"I suppose you were useful after all -- there's always the chance of having to defend someone too stupid to remain on the sidelines where they belong. What do you have to say about your performance?"

Illyana took a deep breath. "I'm out of condition, out of practice, and haven't gotten used to the difference between what I remember being able to do and what I can really do now yet."

"I didn't ask for excuses." 

"That was a list of things to remedy." She winced internally at how she'd snapped that, and tried to still the tiny muscle spasms making her tremble. "May I join you again tomorrow?"

Cable stared at her for a moment. "Same terms. If you can move." To all of them, "Out. Hit the showers."

**********

The hot water felt good, but Illyana was still dragging badly when she toweled off, realized she probably should have brought something to change into, and wrapped up in the towel to go back to her room. She should probably go walking after that. Something. Everything hurt; she didn't want to move, but she didn't dare succumb to the urge to lie still. Then she really wouldn't be able to move tomorrow morning. 

Besides, napping in the middle of the hall was likely to give the wrong idea.

Head down, focused on the next step, she walked into someone large and solid. She looked up, blinking. "Oh. Stryfe." 

"For some reason," he remarked with a faint smile, "I kept thinking you might stop." A pause. "Illyana, what happened to you?"

"I was training with X-Force." Almost to her own door. Move those feet. One at a time, not up to jumping. She managed a smile of her own. "Not... bad." Hand on the doorknob. "I'll get dressed again, see you later?" 

It was so tempting just to throw herself down on the bed and not budge for the rest of, say, the month. No. She closed the door firmly behind her and put on the nice, comfortable, soft but sturdy clothes she usually wore, suitable for running around the grounds or even in public without attracting comment. 

_I didn't think I could cause that much of an abrasion on smooth floor through cloth. I'll have to remember that._ The shorts displayed the red scrape on her knee quite nicely. 

She straightened up from crouching to examine it and groaned quietly as her body complained about this proceeding. Walk. Maybe she could run around the grounds. Had she really felt this bad after Cat made her run all day? Running wouldn't help her arms that much, though.... 

Maybe she could climb a tree. An oak.... 

Tears stung her eyes.

**********

Illyana stopped in the hallway and frowned at the voices. Christopher and Nathan were yelling at each other. This usually wasn't a good thing. 

They were between her and outdoors, too. She decided to treat that as convenient rather than ominous, and walked calmly toward the room. 

"She's eleven years old, Nathan, and she is not and never has been part of your little fan club! You had no business --"

"X-Force is not a fan club and it was her idea."

"It -- what?" 

"That's right." Both men swung around to look at her, and Illyana grinned despite the aches. They'd been too intent on their argument to hear her on her way. "He actually tried to talk me out of it, Chris, so knock it off. Besides, it was a good workout." She started moving again, through the room. She was _not_ going to walk or move as if she was in pain. It took most of her pride to keep that resolution. "I'm going for a walk. Chris? Want to come with me?"

Christopher directed another decidedly unfriendly glare at Cable, and joined Illyana at the door. 

"Where are we going?"

"For a walk."

"You said that," Christopher pointed out, reasonably enough.

"It's a walk. You go out and wander around and then come back, without necessarily having any particular path or destination other than to get back to where you started eventually."

Christopher halted and put a hand on her shoulder to force her to do the same. "Ah... are you upset about something?"

Illyana looked up at him for a moment and then smiled. "Not very. Tired enough to show it when I get sentimental over oak trees, but mostly just driven by the compelling feeling that if I lie down I'll never work the lactic acid out. At least not in time for tomorrow's session."

"Sentimental over oak trees?" 

"I can't make an acorn that doesn't explode." 

Christopher gave her a look which strongly suggested he suspected the conversation of no longer making sense. 

Illyana smiled at him again and turned to start walking before it became excessively difficult. Keep moving. That was right. "I tried to, you know. In Limbo. It never worked. Ororo did it; she made it out of her power and her life, in defiance of Belasco's tainting her, and it grew into the one thing he couldn't destroy or turn of all she'd made." 

"You said she trained you...." 

"Exactly."

"Illyana."

"What? I became his apprentice. He couldn't destroy it. I... did." 

"How?"

Not, Illyana reflected, the most comforting response. She would probably have been annoyed if he had tried to find one, though. "He cast me out for killing her when he wanted to steal her soul. He cursed me not to die and threw me into a blizzard on the wastes --"

"Cursed you... not to die?" 

"Yes. Immortality with the ability to starve, freeze, fall ill, and take wounds left intact is a fairly potent curse, Chris."

"...I suppose so." He sounded bemused.

"I was thrown against the tree and used it for shelter and sustenance; I drew on it once too often, and the last acorn that blew up in my face drained it far enough that it fell and crumbled to dust." She closed her eyes. "After it withstood all else he ever tried." 

"You don't think that was Belasco's purpose, surely...."

"Why not?" She closed her eyes as she walked, taking his hand after a moment so she didn't have to think about holding her course. She was so tired.... The memories were more wearying than the workout had been. "How should I know? But why not? I only know he didn't expect the sword." 

"The Soulsword. That was when?"

"I realized that I didn't want what Ororo wanted. That was why it never worked. I didn't hold the beliefs she was affirming; I didn't want to make clean life to show he couldn't wholly take me. I wanted to cut the bonds he'd put on me. I wanted revenge. I wanted to kill him. So I made a sword." She opened her eyes again and let his hand fall. "He's still there. I won by _not_ killing him, twice. Limbo won't let him die either, you see." 

The released hand brushed over her hair, lightly. "Is there anything I'm really supposed to say here? Being comforting is not a skill I've much developed. I can sympathize, but my instinct would be to cheer you on, and that seems a bit inappropriate."

Illyana laughed suddenly. "This is fine, really. I appreciate you coming with me... instead of sticking to the argument with Cable."

Christopher allowed the subject change. "I am still quite sure he's to blame for something. Your claim to have instigated the whole thing does, however, complicate matters somewhat."

"I'd half expected you to stay just to avoid backing down."

"That's him, not me. He always used to take offense at my teleporting away from a conflict before he thought we were done." Illyana looked up in time to catch a smirk. "It was an excellent way to annoy him. Now where was it you planned to go?"

She shrugged, deliberately wriggling her shoulders against the soreness. "It was my idea. And I need to keep moving, after that." She smiled sweetly. "I thought I'd go climb a tree."

"...And you want me along for this?"

"You're good company?"

"What do you want me to do?"

She couldn't help laughing at his tone. He was probably thinking about her fondness for branches that didn't look as if they ought to bear her weight. "Walk with me. I don't care if you climb or not; I'll pick a nice sturdy one in case you want to."

"I could simply hold myself up telekinetically instead of relying on the tree."

"Either way."

Illyana was clambering high in the branches of -- surprise -- an oak when Stryfe, settled fairly comfortably in the lower ones, asked as neutrally as he could, "How did it go?"

"The Danger Room session? I was horrible. The New Mu... er... X-Force looks pretty good, though. Nathan didn't want to admit it, but I think they surprised him a few times. In a good way." 

"They _should_ have improved since he's been here. He shouldn't think he's that indispensable, and if he didn't expect anyone else to train them, I have to wonder about his claims of wanting to promote their survival."

"Be nice."

"This is me."

"I doubt he thought _that_. He'd still remember where they were before, though."

Christopher shrugged as she dropped onto his branches, far enough out that they swayed under her weight. "As you like. Why do you say you were horrible?"

"Because I was, of course. I knew I would be -- I'm just a kid next to them now, and I'm not in condition. Not like I... remember being."

"Of course you aren't. You'd been undergoing combat training before."

"By the time Cat got through with me, I could run all day and come close to defeating her with blades in the evening." 

"That was when Cat got through with you. You haven't been being trained for that lately. You're nowhere near being fit to send out on your own, even if you'd have been about to come of age in my time." He sighed. "You could have asked me, you know."

"Asked you what?"

"To help you train." Christopher frowned at her. "Instead of subjecting yourself to Nathan."

Illyana climbed sideways to an adjacent branch so that she could get close enough to the trunk to hug him. He didn't tense the way she'd ignored when he first arrived. "Nathan doesn't like me. You do. I was afraid you'd be too nice to me."

He nearly spluttered. "I don't go easy on anyone."

"Then why be so angry that Nathan didn't?"

"He's Nathan. I don't like him -- he hates me -- and I don't trust him with you."

"He won't harm me."

"He would if he thought it necessary."

"Can't you say that of yourself as well? I hope so." Illyana shrugged.

"I would still teach you, if you like. More than just fighting. Don't worry. I won't be too nice."

"I'd still want to train with X-Force. If it doesn't bother them too much. Group-work was always the hardest to get used to."

"I know the feeling," Christopher observed pensively. "You could still train with them, I suppose. Of course, I'm tempted to take them on again at some point. Perhaps I'll steal you to be on my side...."

"We'll see." She laughed, then sobered. "And... thank you. I would like your help."

"Good. Hop down and let's get started."

Illyana nearly fell out of the tree. "_Now_?"

Stryfe smirked, swung down, and easily pulled her out of the branches to set her own the ground. "I did promise."

**********


	10. 10/10

**Unexpected Companions  
by Persephone  
Chapter 10/10**

Strange snippets, slices of life. Family moments. Madelyne had arrived much later than Nate Grey, but to Cable's surprise, though hardly delighted with the situation since her death, she seemed to reconcile herself to it. Jean's dragging her off to visit the Grey household surprised their parents somewhat but seemed to help.

Nathan and Stryfe managed to cooperate to set up a new identity for her. This didn't bother her; her first had been made up too. She insisted on testing to recover her pilot's license for real, though.

Some very strange snippets.

**********

"I can cook," Stryfe -- Christopher -- announced in tones of protest.

Nathan looked at him. "The problem, Stryfe, is that no one in their right mind would dare _eat_ anything you'd cooked."

"I'd say I eat my own cooking, but that would just be asking for it...."

**********

"Act your age, you two!" Jean reprimanded.

"Which age?" Nathan inquired brightly. "I'm chronologically seven."

"That," Illyana intervened helpfully, "is in some cultures the hypothetical Age of Reason." A pause. "I don't think either one of them is there yet."

"They could TRY." Madelyne, for once, was in entire agreement with Jean. This wasn't a unique event, but was relatively rare. This was probably fortunate, as it tended to scare Nathan and Christopher.

Cable shrugged and looked appealingly from one mother-figure to the other. "So can I have a cookie?" There was general snickering.

They didn't even look at each other. "Not until after dinner."

Even Stryfe broke up laughing.

**********

Madelyne also attended X-Force's karaoke party. It was corny, if strangely entertaining. "The Day the Music Died," however, was probably an unfortunate choice of music. Except for that, however, the evening was a success.

Strange to see everyone get along that well. Not that it was idyllic, but none of Nathan's relatives were trying to kill him (or vice versa) or each other, and for them, that was close.

**********

Stryfe tapped at the door to Xavier's study, was acknowledged, and went in. "Excuse me. I was looking for a book and was told it had last been seen in your company."

Charles laughed softly and lifted one from his desk. "This?"

"Are you still using it?"

"Not at the moment." Charles steepled his fingers, then gestured at another chair. "I had been hoping for a chance to speak with you, however." 

Such a thing wasn't particularly hard to come by, or shouldn't have been. Stryfe understood that the unspoken portion of the sentence was _without my students being alarmed or making things uncomfortable._ Most of the X-Men were reasonably accustomed to Stryfe, but still got just a bit nervous when he talked to their mentor. 

Xavier's control of what he communicated, by mind or word or motion, was good enough that Stryfe wasn't entirely sure whether his continued presence bothered the professor or not. He did assume that if he were considered seriously untrustworthy he would have been invited to leave by this point.

"About something in particular?"

"Yes." Charles looked first thoughtful, then wry. "Lila Cheney has scheduled another concert in Central Park."

"I gather you plan to speak at this one as well?"

Charles inclined his head. "Yes." A smile twitched at his lips. "I trust this one will be at least slightly less eventful?"

Stryfe had heard that coming since the name left the other man's lips. "For my part, you are correct." He paused and looked at the bookshelves over Xavier's shoulder. Slowly, and somewhat uncomfortably, he added, "Perhaps I should mention that in the course of assuring that I would have the opportunity to do so myself, I found it necessary to interfere with one or two other plots to kill you."

"Somehow I am not overly surprised at their existence." Charles paused. "I suppose I am pleased that --" He broke off, consideringly.

"Trying to find a tactful way to point out that I failed?" Stryfe smiled faintly, himself. "I had in fact noticed that you were carrying on a conversation with no indications of being dead. I can't say I regret that particular failure."

"I'm glad to hear that." More amusement colored the tone; Charles then stopped to wait for Stryfe to come to his point. 

Stryfe, for his part, suspected that the other telepath had already divined it, but that didn't eliminate reason to speak it. "I have, as you surmised, no intention of carrying out the main thrust of my mission that day. I could however prevent other attempts again. I know where to look."

"I would appreciate that very much," Xavier returned gravely. Presumably what he had been leading up to all along. Stryfe was about to stand and reach for the book when Charles spoke again. "Please refrain from killing them."

Stryfe sighed. "You are so impractical."

"Christopher...."

"Very well. Barring necessity, I'll leave them alive and even relatively unmaimed." 

**********

"Christopher! There you are." Illyana grinned and waved as Stryfe made his way to her through the crowd. "I saved you a spot," she announced as he reached her. Leaning against the wall she was perched atop, but definitely a spot.

"So you did." He took his place, arms folded as he leaned back against the bricks. "Having fun up there?" 

"Well, if you take into account the fact that nothing's _happened_ yet, yes, I'm having a ball." She patted Stryfe's shoulder with a foot. 

"Nothing had _better_ happen," Nathan growled, emerging from the crowd himself to lean on the wall beside Stryfe and favor his clone with a glare. 

"Well, the speech and concert should happen," Stryfe murmured without looking at him. "I _am_ covering security, after all."

"I'm sure Bishop is thrilled."

"He's being quite admirably paranoid. It's rather entertaining."

"And you?"

"What do you think?" Stryfe asked smoothly.

"Fox to guard the henhouse, wolf to guard the flock..." Nathan grumbled.

Stryfe turned to eye him inquisitively at that point. "That was curiously rhythmic. Have you taken up composing poetry when you're in a bad mood, or are you quoting something?"

"No." Cable folded his arms and leaned back on the wall, glowering straight ahead.

"Too bad. I was going to ask about the next line."

A huff. "Xavier put you up to this, didn't he?"

"Looking out for plots to kill him? Yes."

"Classic." Nathan snorted faintly, sounding more amused than genuinely annoyed now. "How many did you find?"

"Three, one of whom apparently arrived early and had the misfortune to encounter you. Either that or there's someone else with a decidedly familiar psi-imprint."

"It was me." A third would have been decidedly alarming. A fourth, really, but Nate Grey was reasonably distinctive. "What did you do to them?"

"Just put them to sleep."

Nathan looked skeptical. "That's not like you." 

Stryfe rolled his eyes. "And wiped the relevant memories, and planted suggestions not to do anything inconvenient." 

"That's... more like you, if perhaps a little hypocritical."

"Why? It would have been a perfectly reasonable reaction if anyone could have managed to do it to me." He looked faintly disgusted. "It was entirely too easy. The only set who bothered with shielding made an absolutely pathetic attempt -- Charles could have found and stopped them all himself this time if he'd bothered."

"If anyone _did_ shield adequately, either of us would be more likely to pick up on the other signs. He's been a soldier, but some types of surreptitious just aren't his forte." 

"Isn't that what Bishop is for?"

"You want to leave it all to him?"

"Of course not. If I haven't checked, it doesn't count. Besides, he wasn't a criminal -- and he's not a telepath." 

"By that logic, shouldn't the rebel-since-age-two be the better choice?"

"You started that late? But, Nathan, I knew you'd run your own check. Don't tell me you didn't find my pair."

"Yes. Are you gloating?"

"Not particularly. There was plenty of time."

"How generous."

Illyana leaned down. "Just out of curiosity, which one of you is making everyone not notice this conversation?"

The two men glanced at each other, then up. "Both, apparently," Stryfe said wryly. "By the way, did you climb up there or teleport?"

"Started to climb and was then spontaneously assisted by a passing... cheerleader, guessing from the way he picked me up."

"Of course. Where'd he go?"

Illyana shrugged. "Away."

"How enlightening."

"That way." She gestured generally off to the side and ahead. "Too bad, too; he was cute." 

"If you see him, watch for his reaction to Xavier," Stryfe suggested. "I'm sure there will be someone who starts yelling...."

Ahead of them, Xavier wheeled toward the microphone. 

"There's always someone who starts yelling," Cable pointed out impatiently. "I used to challenge -- or outright heckle -- Askani religious services. After Slym and Redd... were gone." He snorted at the peculiar look he received from Stryfe. "I met Blaquesmith that way; maybe I should have kept my mouth shut. But if that's the worst we have to worry about today, we're doing fai-- _What the flonq is that?_"

The urgency brought him and Stryfe both upright from leaning on the wall, and Illyana to a crouch on top of it. 

Stryfe began, "I don't see anythi--"

Nathan had been just a little bit early. He was still far, far too late to do any good.

_That_ was a flash of light, a silver-white iridescent ribbon, a curtain of whitewater, a million-faceted crystal wall, a gash in reality that ripped across the park.

A bright red spray decorated it in spots for a moment, and people fell away screaming, or pieces of them simply fell and the rest was gone. 

Fully formed, the fault froze in place and for a moment was still visible yet absolutely clear.

The people on the other side were wrong. Some of them were bleeding too. The stage was in the wrong place; one corner was missing. Three young people were tuning up their various musical instruments and seemed alarmed at what had happened to their audience. 

Xavier was nowhere in sight.

The streak that had spread through the air and ground became a blur, painful to look at, and began slowly to move.

Nathan stared at it in horror and whispered, "What have I done?"

**********

Cable jerked his head upright and squeezed his eyes shut, hands clenched on the scryer hard enough that by all rights they should have broken the thin metal, or failing that, been cut by it. Bright Lady... the nightmares had been better. 

"Nathan."

It was bad enough to know what he'd done to his own world. It was the worst of a long string of failures to haunt him. He watched his alternate share in the guilt for something that happened without a cause native to that timeline, and wanted to die, but couldn't help blaming his alternate as well, against all logic.

"Nathan?" 

He couldn't look into the scryer again. He would give it back to Illyana -- no, he would break it! His hands tightened for a moment. No. He had no right -- to more destruction. He would give it back. Why didn't they hate him for this?

"Nathan!" 

The hiss of his name finally got his attention, and he dropped the scrying device as if it had suddenly burned him. "Stryfe." He shuddered. "Why don't you hate me?"

There was a short and rather puzzled silence ending in a cautiously flippant, "Who says I don't?"

That served as a sharp prod back into a comparatively normal state of mind, and Cable took a deep breath. "Not what I meant."

"What _did_ you mean?" Stryfe gestured at the scryer. "What did you see just now, Nathan?"

_Stop that. I don't need to be reminded of my own name._ Unfortunately. "When the shifts came to your timeline." Why deny it? 

"I should have guessed."

"Why?"

"I was with your alternate at the time. I assume you caught that part. I saw how he reacted."

"He didn't do anything."

"I'm aware of that. He seemed to be convinced that the whole thing was somehow his fault anyway. I found it quite curious."

"I'm sure you enjoyed it." 

"That is not what I said, Nathan." 

And Stryfe was not one to gloat _subtly_. He would usually come right out and be blatant about it. Overkill or nothing, that was the Chaos-Bringer.... 

"Besides," Stryfe added blandly, "it wasn't a particularly enjoyable situation."

Nathan thought about throwing the scryer at him. "No," he said instead, tightly, "I imagine not."

Stryfe leaned back against the headboard after casting a suspicious eye over it. "We were divided up in fairly short order. It would have been more effective to stay together as much as possible, of course, but as the X-Men were relatively spread out at the concert, and hence started off at something of a disadvantage. Also, of course, no one quite seemed to know what was going on -- your alternate seemed to have a remarkable feel for the general properties of each new world we were thrown into, but he wasn't especially forthcoming otherwise."

"Why are you telling me this?" Nathan glared across the gap between beds.

His clone shrugged languidly. "You're awake."

"You probably know as much about them as I do, now," Nathan growled, quietly as he reminded himself that there was presumably someone trying to sleep in the room. "I thought Illyana could find people."

"The one from the timeline we're in can locate individuals and fragments from her timeline or similar ones because they're marked by the mixing of Earth and Limbo, if I followed the dinner conversation correctly. By the time we realized the need and she found a way to mark those she wanted to find again, it was too late for most of those we would have been interested in retrieving."

"Like who?"

"Teammates and relatives. Who else?" Stryfe shook his head. "Who were the Twelve, Nathan?"

He jerked upright and stared across the dark again. "What?"

"Who were the Twelve? You mentioned then when we were talking to... ah... En Sabah Nur." Nathan thought he saw the other man shudder slightly, but it was difficult to tell in the shadows. "I can think of almost that many mythical or mystical significances to the number, and Sanctity mentioned something about it that seems, in retrospect, to have had to do with the Sentinels, but none seem patently relevant."

"Scott and Jean." Nathan smiled grimly to see Stryfe start. "Xavier, Magneto, Polaris, Bishop, the Living Monolith, Storm, Mikhail Rasputin, Iceman, Sunfire." The smile twisted. "And me."

"Aside from being involved in the battle -- and apparently infecting their alternates with some sort of guilt-complex about it -- what's their significance _now_? Do they even still have one? Is that why Nathan knew things he should have had no way of knowing about the timelines? I've seen you do the same thing." Stryfe obviously suspected his last two answers would be "yes," or he would never have asked.... 

Unfortunately, he was right. "I think... think the Twelve are all going mad at varying rates. And getting control of the shifts at corresponding ones." Cable shuddered involuntarily. "I've met -- met versions of some of them I had to kill."

Stryfe refrained from asking how Cable could tell this. "At least one of the list, in our timeline, wasn't the most sane person I've met in the first place." He glanced towards Illyana, and Nathan realized Stryfe must have meant Mikhail. He bit back a comment about Stryfe's sanity as the man continued thoughtfully. "That... what you describe might explain the version of you who twisted a shift-line into a spiral around me. Not that it would require any unusual circumstances for him to consider killing _me_, in whatever creative methods, but what he tried to do to Illyana -- I think I know how you fight, Nathan, and that was beneath you."

A flickered image told him what his alternate had tried. He shuddered again. "Did you kill him?" he asked bluntly.

"No."

"Bright Lady, why NOT?!" 

Stryfe laughed, ever so softly. "Because this was very early after the shifts started, and initially Illyana and I had our version of you with us, and he beat me to it. Now we can't find him." He frowned and corrected himself. "Actually, between our respective abilities and... links to him, we've managed to locate him occasionally. Or so we think -- we just haven't been able to get to him."

"You're trying?"

"There _is_ a goal to our search other than allowing Illyana to assist as many versions of you as possible. He was... the last one we lost. As I said, we should be able to find him." Stryfe slid down the headboard and back onto his pillow, comfortably. "I sometimes wonder if Illyana wouldn't do better on her own; it's entirely possible that I'm the one he's avoiding." 

"I wouldn't be surprised. Or maybe he doesn't want anyone finding him." Nathan stared at the scryer in his lap and carefully picked it up to set aside, where the other pillow had been before he stacked them. "Maybe you don't want to find him."

"I beg your pardon?" Stryfe's voice was suddenly cold.

"Granted, if only because it was fun to hear you say that." Cable felt himself glared at. "I'm serious. There may be good reason not to want to find him."

"I thought at first you meant to suggest I was somehow sabotaging the attempts." 

"That wasn't what I meant. Why? Are you?" It certainly wasn't implausible, especially if it had leapt to Stryfe's mind so readily.

"No. Why should we not want to find him?" Offended, but apparently sincere....

Nathan sighed and made the point more clearly. "If he's skilled enough with the shifts to keep a few steps ahead of you, how far gone is he?" 

There was silence for a moment, then, far too calmly, "It depends on how he's doing it. If necessary, I'll kill him."

"Only if it's necessary?"

"Yes." 

Nathan lay back. "You might not be able to win, you know."

**********They left Illyana and Tyler's Limbo-esque patch of Earth as graciously as they could manage. It seemed a little absurd to walk away from such a comparatively stable area -- if that applied to anything involving Limbo -- except that none of them really wanted to stay. Probably the same reason Illyana and Stryfe hadn't stuck to Limbo in the first place.

"Are you sure you don't mind?" Illyana was being painstakingly polite to her alternate, who had casually suggested that if they were determined to leave, they might as well teleport directly to somewhere else moderately hospitable instead of looking for a shiftline. Apparently this was very generous -- something about various timelines' Illyanas generally avoiding trespass on one anothers realms. It confused the demons.

"It won't be a problem. Go to Limbo. Find some locus that feels like yours. Pick your destination from there." A pause. "Good journey." Had she picked that up from Tyler? "Find what you seek."

"I'm not looking for anything," Nathan replied under his breath.

Tyler answered him anyway. "Are you certain?"

**********

It was foggy again. It was a light fog, though, barely a haze of mist except where it pooled silver-white in depressions in the ground. Apparently it stuck to the dirt; the ground was mostly covered with a thin layer of chocolate-brown lichen, or something like lichen, but where the coating was disturbed -- or gouged -- it rapidly frosted over.

Frosted wasn't quite right. The mist was curiously warm. The lichen was edible, but Nathan hadn't seen the need to mention it yet.

He stooped and scraped up a piece, brushing off black dirt that turned silver as it fell from the underside and leaving a fast-whitening patch on the ground. He wasn't hungry yet, if anything still a little queasy from the aftertaste of something off Illyana's table, but he was curious. 

The lichen was mildly sweet, with a little of the flavor of honey. 

Wasn't manna supposed to be white?

"I'd ask if you hadn't ever grown out of eating dirt as a child, but I assume you know what you're doing."

"I hope _you_ didn't eat dirt as a child, Stryfe. Most of it was toxic. This seems to be the local base of the food chain -- no." He realized suddenly that that wasn't right. "It's eating the mist."

"That makes _my_ day, I assure you. More predatory fog." 

"You weren't listening. The fog is the prey. It drops to the ground to reproduce; they're both photosynthetic, but the mist climbs to get most of the light, so the lichen eats it. When other things eat the lichen there's space for the mist to get a spot on the ground for a while and spawn...."

"Fascinating as this is, there's something disturbing about your intuitive grasp of the population dynamics of a completely alien ecosystem."

"It can't be completely alien. We're still on Earth. This whole mess is still on Earth. I hope." Cable paused and tried for a lighter tone. "At least it isn't explosive sand." 

"I don't want to know, Nathan." Stryfe frowned at a mist-filled gouge. "What eats the lichen?"

"Me, so far." He shrugged at the look Stryfe gave him. "I can't tell from this."

The plain of matte-brown seemed to go on endlessly. Nathan caught himself brooding again over the shifts and tried for distraction by thinking about the older scenes from his companions' timeline. 

Before. 

"Stryfe. Question." 

"Hm?"

"Who got Sam to sing 'Princes of the Universe,' and HOW?" 

Stryfe laughed. "I'm not entirely sure about the first and suspect whoever had the idea for incense." He grimaced. "Which one wouldn't think should mix well with karaoke." 

Nathan snorted. "Not really. You sure it wasn't the punch?"

"I doubt it. For one thing, our Nathan was probably paying attention -- for another, neither of us drank much of it after odd things started finding their way in, but that song still set us off discussing a hypothetical world takeover by X-Force for about an hour afterwards." 

Cable set down the scryer, carefully, and stared at Stryfe. "Are you joking?" 

"Not _now_. I was at the time, although I admit there were one or two moments I started to wonder about your alternate."

"Sam wouldn't be that bad." 

Stryfe gave him a look. "You would say that. I still get a bit nervous about Externals." 

Nervous? "Any other one and I'd probably agree with you," Nathan conceded. "I still can't believe you spent an hour in friendly conversation with my alternate." 

"We had mostly gotten used to each other." Stryfe sounded slightly annoyed. "And I did say I had suspicions about the incense." 

Nathan slowed, sensing a shift about to open. "Bear left...." He was still walking and half-stumbled ungracefully when a scaly creature the same brown as the lichen made a sudden trundling dash on stubby legs practically beneath his feet. 

While he recovered his balance, it turned back towards the silver swath that formed its trail to watch the shift rip open, gave an offended honk, and then went on its way. A broad, flattened lower lip scraped up its meal and explained the white band left in the creature's wake.

Now how had IT known?

Cable stared through the clear boundary to see heavier fog and bare ground. The hair on his arms was still standing up. Not for a shift -- he felt more of the Twelve. 

And an odd residence that meant one of them was _him_. 

Stryfe and Illyana exchanged a look. Stryfe said thoughtfully, "I think this one is ours."

Nathan dragged his gaze away from the shiftline. "How do you figure?"

"I contacted him telepathically and his initial impulse wasn't to try to kill me. That's unusual in anyone I can immediately recognize as one of you," Stryfe replied drily.

Nathan snorted. "You two _have_ come a long way. There must have been timelines close to yours, though." 

"I... can tell. I told you we'd been looking for him." Stryfe shrugged. "This one remembers when we were separated." Stryfe actually sounded as if he were _pleased_ to have located his own timeline's Cable. 

"Fair enough. But you also said he'd been trying to avoid you." 

"Maybe he'll stay put this time," Illyana interrupted with a tone of finality. "We might want to gather some of the... lichen, if you two don't want to depend on Limbo fare. It doesn't grow through there, that I can see."

"He's not in the shift you can see," Nathan murmured, staring through the transparent boundary at all the worlds in between. "You can't step through into it, either." A sudden laugh bubbled up and escaped his throat. "It's lying, you see." In a more normal tone, he added practically, "Food doesn't always go through shifts well."

"Nothing always goes through shifts well," Stryfe said impatiently. "Illyana will teleport."

**********

They landed soon, well laden, several feet in front of... another Cable. Not that this was a surprise, as it was after all what they had aimed for. The unexpected part was that Illyana apparently hadn't noticed and Stryfe apparently hadn't mentioned that "their" Cable had company.

Piotr Rasputin was trying to persuade Nathan to quit staring out toward the shiftlines intersecting in the distance and come back to sit by the campfire. He had just cast an anxious glance back over his shoulder to where own brother Mikhail sat brooding when they appeared.

Illyana shrieked and dropped her bundle of lichen to leap at him.

Piotr turned to catch her just in time, flickering to metal in startlement and back to flesh as his sister catapulted into his arms. 

Nathan glanced at his alternate, who worryingly enough was still staring _past_ them -- not waiting for them, then, he supposed -- and thought to Stryfe, #You knew.#

#Yes. I thought she might like the surprise.#

**********

Nathan decided to join Illyana and Mikhail at the fire well before Stryfe and Piotr gave up for a time on coaxing his alternate to do so. His decision was somewhat spurred by the cool air, somewhat more by the vaguely uneasy looks he was starting to get, as if the other two were wondering if he'd turn out to be as much trouble.

He got the distinct impression that Mikhail and the other Cable -- actually, he supposed that to everyone else in the camp _he_ was "the other Cable," but he wasn't about to start thinking of himself that way -- had in fact been a great deal of trouble. Very difficult. Practically impossible. And that was with Piotr never uttering a word of more complaint than "I _am_ very relieved to see you again. It has not been entirely easy to care for them."

"Care for them." Stryfe blinked and shook his head. "Have they forgotten how?"

"They are... both in a very strange frame of mind."

"They haven't threatened you, have they?"

"I fear sometimes they will kill each other." Nathan noticed that Piotr hadn't precisely denied any threats to himself.

Stryfe frowned, but didn't challenge. "How did you find them? We had something of a clue regarding Nathan's whereabouts, since we actually were with him when the shifts began, but it still took us until now...."

"I simply ran across them. It hadn't been very long for me -- I think it may have been more time for them, somehow."

"Possible, I think." 

"At first I didn't even think to question if they were from my own timeline."

"They seem to be. At least, Nathan remembers the same things I do, as far as we've been able to determine. You and Mikhail... at least accept enough to go on with."

"Accept...?"

"You recognized me, yet weren't alarmed to see me with your sister."

"Should I have been?"

"No -- but we have alternates where it would be...." Stryfe glanced at Nathan, then shook his head sharply. "Never mind." He frowned across the meters separating his own timeline's Cable from the fire. "We're going to lose him again at this rate.... Nathan! Since when do you admit to trusting me at your back?"

The other Cable turned and glared at his clone, then stalked deliberately and grudgingly back towards the fire and around between Stryfe and Nathan, where he could keep an eye on both Stryfe and the shifts. "Not as if you can do worse than I did now," he muttered bleakly.

"Isn't blaming you illogically for things _my_ job? You didn't do it." 

"I did." He raised his eyes to his alternate, who met them and felt a sudden icy chill. "You did. You know." 

"He knows how they started, or thinks he does," Stryfe began.

"Tell me." Without looking away.

Nathan started the same explanation he'd given before, to Stryfe and Illyana and of all people Nur, with a feeling of cold leaden satisfaction in his throat and heart and stomach. His alternate might not understand yet, but he _knew_; finally someone gave him the blame he deserved. Beneath the frozen shame, though, lay a slow growing furious burn. It was the other's fault too, beyond all logic; they were one even though they weren't, and how _dare_ he think he had the right to lay blame. 

The conversation seemed perfectly reasonable until Stryfe leapt up and moved between them, tense and wary. His voice was light, though, that infuriating mocking tone he cultivated, but with an edge of self-deprecation Nathan had never heard before in place of the arrogance. Or perhaps he hadn't noticed. "Nathan, Nathan! Oath, I'm right here and the two of you look ready to try to kill each _other_?" More teasing still. "I feel so left out." 

He almost seemed to mean it.

Nathan realized he and his alternate were on their feet and had been shouting at each other, voices and throats raw with anger and eyes blinded with rage. Reasonable. It had all seemed perfectly reasonable, but why didn't he remember standing up?

He broke eye contact and turned away, glancing briefly at Stryfe and then across the Rasputin group. Illyana was watching him steadily out of dark blue eyes from where she lay half-curled on her side between her brothers, her head on Mikhail's knee. Mikhail wasn't looking up. 

Piotr was watching him and his alternate with a somehow resigned expression that flickered rather thankfully in Stryfe's direction. He had an air of having just relaxed.

Nathan turned to stare at the fire in disgust with himself as he sat back down. He was suddenly certain that this was just the sort of thing Piotr had been putting up with all along when he could have simply walked away from the two madmen he'd been shepherding. As if he'd needed another one.

Up until thirty seconds ago he would have said he wasn't as far gone as his alternate.

"You should get some sleep," Illyana told him softly. He thought she'd spoken aloud, but no one else appeared to have heard her.

"We need to get out of here," his alternate said suddenly. He sounded perfectly clear-headed for the moment, but anxious. Cable turned, still on the ground, to see the shifts in the distance sweeping towards them. Illyana hissed, and they were in Limbo, and then they were... somewhere else.

Their campfire was completely undisturbed. That was fairly impressive. It was, along with the rest of them, sitting on a broad flat stone in the middle of a rocky stretch of desert. There was a patch of palm trees in the distance, but not an oasis, nor yet a mirage; it was a little round cylindrical piece of another shift, what looked like a tiny tropical island.

There was ocean all around it, cut off sharply where it met the desert. That had to be the shiftline, even though he couldn't see it.

Useless to them for water. It was broad daylight here, brilliant heat pouring down to batter them against the sand-sprinkled stone. Immediately to their west, though, a high cluster of rocky hills rose against the stark blue sky, and he knew there was a spring somewhere in their depths.

Not a bad site, all in all, even if Illyana apparently expected him to go to sleep with the sun in his eyes. He lay down on his left side on the rock and felt the heat seep through the metal, the light pounding through closed eyelids to turn his vision mottled black and red. For some reason it was soothing.

He found himself drifting, not exactly half-asleep but in that strange lethargic space just next to it where the information poured in by the senses pooled in his mind without seeming to require any sort of action. Everyone there was tired. He thought Stryfe's voice sounded a little more shaken than he probably meant for it to. 

He knew when the rest of them lay down as well, seeking rest as the sun slipped across the top of the stone. Piotr had gone to get water for them earlier, passing without comment from his sister who could have conjured a lake if they'd wanted, but with some sour bit of nothingness dissolved in it to linger at the back of the throat. 

His alternate stayed up; so did Stryfe. They'd been talking ever since, half aloud and half telepathically, but they seemed to forget or not bother or be unable to shield him out of the conversation most of the time. He wasn't even making any effort to eavesdrop. They'd been quarreling half-heartedly about the time of day for a while; it was clear enough here, but in the dim light of the earlier shift there had been fewer indications. His alternate maintained it had been late evening; Stryfe said they had started out in midmorning and couldn't possibly have been walking _that_ long. 

It was an utterly pointless argument. Nathan suspected, despite the incongruity of it, that Stryfe was trying to calm his alternate down. Or perhaps they were both taking refuge in some half-semblance of normality by arguing with each other... not that they'd ever admit it if he suggested it. Which he wouldn't, because he'd certainly never admit to such a thing either if it were him. Or, for that matter, if it wasn't.

The conversation finally turned to the shifts themselves, Stryfe caught in the odd position of trying to defend his longtime enemy against self-accusations, occasionally grumbling about why he bothered and about being too much in the habit of contradicting. Nathan wasn't sure if it was exasperation or encouragement that finally brought out the silken comment, "But you were always a revolutionary, Nathan, not an anarchist. If you _have_ torn down one system -- what are you going to put in its place?"

It should have sounded cruel. It did leave his alternate silent. Perhaps it was only his own wearied, strange state of mind that made him hear it as a challenge. 

Or perhaps his alternate did too.

_"Find what you seek,"_ the other Illyana had said.

He wasn't looking for anything.

But was he sure?

Was that it, some way to repair this shattering? He couldn't even think of a way to start.

That didn't necessarily have to stop him.

Or was it something else, something more selfish, a fragment of companionship or belonging in the chaos....

And had he already found it?

He didn't belong with these people. He wasn't even from their timeline; one of them was _Stryfe_ -- but they didn't offer the faintest suggestion he should go, in word or thought. He shouldn't try to kill his alternate, though. He'd caused them enough trouble.

But maybe he'd walk with them a while longer.

**********


End file.
